Remote Diagnosis Server

Modern systems such as fly-by-wire aircraft, nuclear power plants, manufacturing facilities, battlefields, etc. are all examples of highly connected network enabled systems. Many of these systems are also mission critical, and need to be monitored round the clock. Such systems typically consist of embedded sensors in networked subsystems that can transmit data to central (or remote) monitoring stations. Moreover, many legacy systems were originally not designed for real-time onboard diagnosis, but are safety critical, and would benefit from such a solution. Embedding additional software or hardware in such systems is often considered too intrusive, and introduces flight safety and validation concerns. Such systems can be equipped to transmit the sensor data to a remote-processing center for continuous health monitoring. At Qualtech Systems, we are developing a Remote Diagnosis Server (RDS) that can support multiple simultaneous diagnostic sessions from a variety of remote systems. The RDS server is built on a three-tier architecture with a "Broker" application in the middle layer, and multiple TEAMS-RT and TEAMATE based reasoners at the backend. The client layer consists of sensor agents that collect test results and transmit them over a message-passing network. The resultant solution is remarkably efficient. Even an old 50 MHz Sparc20 can support tens of concurrent sessions involving hundreds of tests. The solution scales easily to hundreds of sessions in any modern workstation or server. Inspired by the significant interest from the aerospace community, we are enhancing the scalability of our RDS solution to solve huge and complex systems such as system-wide health monitoring of the International Space station or a fleet of commercial jetliners. We also recently won an STTR from NASA to make RDS accessible to automobiles and appliances over standard wireless telephone networks.