Microlok Diagnostic Unit and Monitoring System

Highlights

Our railway Customer, a major player in the field of railway signaling and integrated transport systems, required development of a diagnostic software for their key product line: MicroLok Interlocking Solutions. PSA successfully accomplished this by delivering a Microlok Diagnostic Unit Data Driver and Diagnostic Monitoring System with additional testing and updates.

Challenge

The Microlok Diagnostic Unit (MDU) Data Driver is a centralized monitoring and diagnostic system for the MicroLok II interlocking product that offers automated maintenance and troubleshooting functionality. This revolutionary software was designed as the solution for upgrading the troubleshooting equipment and the overall acceleration of the system.

The MDU is intended to collect the data from hardware units, which it then transfers into a database that is accessible upon request from the user.

The primary objective for the Microlok Diagnostic Unit Data Driver project includes the design, development and testing of the Microlok Diagnostic Unit (MDU) Data Driver. The following relevant technologies were used: Data warehouse diagnostic driver specifications for interfaces, operations, configurations, data encodings and messages.

Performance issues were identified during the deployment of the MicroLok Diagnostic Unit project on the Customer’s production environment, which affected large-scale system deployments. It was necessary to define performance bottlenecks and resolve them in order to deploy the MDU in a larger scale environment at capacity.

Solution

The goal was to collect, store and analyze high volume data pertaining to the relative state of geographically distributed devices. We chose effective and sustainable communication methods with devices, data storage and end users, such as XML and SNMP servers, to resolve this issue. We developed powerful methods for processing and visual presentation of the real time and historical status of all connected devices, as well as methods for remote device management and emergency notification. The developed system required protection from both unauthorized access and data loss, thus it was essential to provide flexibility and dynamic configurability. Our software engineers achieved this through an architectural solution that utilized a custom Webmin server module.