| Moxa's monitoring system receives data transmitted from serial monitoring devices |
Moxa, a provider of hardened networking, communications and computing solutions, announced recently the issuance of a new United States patent (No. 8396947) for its active monitoring system for serial monitoring devices, a technology that creates new efficiencies for SCADA systems.
In a typical SCADA architecture, the SCADA system obtains monitoring data from an OPC Server that communicates to field monitoring devices. Moxa's technology enables data from serial monitoring devices in the field to be proactively sent to the OPC server and to the SCADA system, resulting in more timely data and lower bandwidth use.
"R&D is one of our core strengths as a company with over 40% of our global staff in engineering or technical positions," notes Steve Frank, Moxa's business development manager for data acquisition. "As we develop new in-house technology to address customer requirements, patents like this are a very important step to protect our investment and safeguard our ability to offer new solutions to our customers."
Moxa's active monitoring system differs from prior methods in that it uses a unique triggering device to receive data transmitted from serial monitoring devices. This serial data is analyzed to generate a device tag which is actively sent to a server that automatically generates a corresponding OPC (Object Linking and Embedding for Process Control) tag for monitoring, therefore enhancing device compatibility and the overall efficiency and bandwidth usage of monitoring systems.
This technology is currently used in a line of Moxa's cellular RTUs that have been optimised for deployment in remote locations that are difficult to connect to control centers and SCADA systems.