Business Software

Project example:

Automation of engine health monitoring system.

Starting Position

A company is providing gas turbine engine health monitoring services for operators across the globe. Engine data is received by email and ftp and is filtered, pre-processed, submitted to existing software for further processing and results entered onto a website all by hand. As their customer base grows, it will become impossible to complete the tasks manually within the time agreed with the customers and also prohibitively expensive.

The Solution

Scitek developed a software suite that completely automates the data handling and manipulation from receipt to web posting. The software also allows administrative control access and reporting tools to authorised users. The code is object oriented, written in C++ and the source is available to the customer on request.

The Result

The efficiency and reliability of the Scitek software has enabled our customer to double their client base from 60 to 120 operators (1000 to 2500 engines) in just two years. A recent press release announced that they now have 200 airlines with 4000 engines using this system.

Some Details

Problem description:

• Automatic processing of data for Engine Health Monitoring service.
• System to operate from point of data receipt by the company (by Email and FTP) to posting of results on the customer's company web portal.
• Analysis to be performed by existing (legacy) software using Oracle databases.
• Processing 24x7 with unsupervised operation.

Service requirements

• High integrity system.
• Distributed across multiple servers.
• Speed of operation to meet individual Service Level Agreements.
• Audit trail of data through the system.
• No data loss.
• Robust.
• Scalable.
• User configurable.

The system design was carried out in collaboration with the customer in order to have their needs fully met. The implementation is a modular software suite of multi-threaded, task-centric programs running in parallel on separate machines on a network. Communication between the modules is by a combination of SQL database (that also provides traceability) and DCOM. A user console module provides access to all the information needed to keep a track of the status of the system and of the data. The console also provides password protected access to control elements of the system in cases where the behaviour of the system needs to be altered in light of external influences.

The software system health is also monitored by separate "watchdog" threads that can alert the logged on users and the administrators that a module has stopped. The causes of the module failure (e.g. database offline or incorrect entries in the configuration database) are logged in the email and in a table in the SQL database. Modules can be restarted remotely using the console program.

Send your enquiries/comments to enquiries@scitekconsultants.co.uk

Copyright © Scitek Consultants Ltd 2006. All rights reserved.
Product and company names listed are trademarks or trade names of their respective companies