Your Flight Data Recorder For The Factory Floor

I don’t think there is anybody who hasn’t heard of Flight Data Recorders (FDRs). These “black boxes,” actually painted orange, are always a focus of the recovery efforts after a crash. FDRs record of all the important flight parameters leading up to the crash.

These recorders have a long history, going back to the late 1800s. Some early devices used scrolling photographic film to record signals with a small motor driving the film every few seconds. After World War II, units were built using copper foil as the recording medium. Different stylists made impressions on the copper foil, recording the values of different parameters. The first unit, similar in use to today’s flight recorders, was created by a Finnish engineer, Veijo Hietala. FDRs are incredibly valuable in retracing the steps that led to a plane crash.

Many control engineers have wished for an FDR when arriving at a plant in the morning, they hear: “About 2am, something happened, and we lost about 10 minutes of production. Everything has been running fine since then.” Situations like this happen all the time and engineers, are completely at a loss to understand what might have happened.

But Real Time Automation, known for Gateways and Historians, now has a flight data recorder for the factory floor. It’s called IntraVUE™, and among its many other features, it provides a post-event recording of exactly what happened and why. Did a switch or device mysteriously reset? Did a portion of the network lose power? Was there an overloaded segment? IntraVUE provides the details just like a flight recorder.

IntraVUE is a network visualization and monitoring application that provides diagnostic information on the health and status of an Ethernet network. It visually presents the network topology, records network events, records all devices it finds on the network and builds KPIs for both the switches and the devices on the network.
Features that are especially important include:

1. Network Topology – IntraVUE provides a visual topology tree of the network showing every device and switch on the network with lines showing all network segments.
2. Device Asset List – IntraVUE records the devices it finds on the network and builds a table containing the IP Address, Mac ID, device name and other identifying information either extracted from the device or provided by the end user.
3. Event Log – IntraVUE records all network activity. After a process upset, IntraVUE can access and event log to identify and diagnose failures such as disconnects, reconnects, ping response failures, moves from switch port to switch port and more.
4. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – IntraVUE develops the KPIs. It provides a KPI for the network as a whole, a KPI for the critical switches and a KPI for critical devices. Users identify what devices are critical to their production process.

IntraVUE empowers maintenance and controls engineers to shift from a reactive to a proactive approach to greatly improve both the uptime and performance of critical, real-time networked automation systems.