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Maintenance and Diagnosis of Device Pools |
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Many automations, for instance vending machines are arranged where they are accessible easily by many people. A maintenance at regular intervals of these machine pools is a time consuming and expensive task. If any problems occur even more costs arise e.g. The loss of gains. To reduce or avoid these problems a remote maintenance via the Internet is an effective solution. The device dials-in the Internet and reports errors or maintenance data to a dedicated maintenance server which forwards for example error messages and stores maintenance data for analyses. A customer may connect the maintenance server and gets the collected data of his devices. To assure no direct influence from any user to a device the user does not directly communicate with the device but with the maintenance server instead.
Advantages
- the administration of large amount of devices is simple
- a structured administration for instance grouped by device types or subgroups is possible
- access rights of user can be easily managed
- additional information are available for instance for statistical purposes
- smooth integration in existing infrastructure
- all accesses are can be journalized
Disadvantages
- an additional server is always required
- increased initial cost compared to the other solutions
Realisation
A XML/SOAP module is integrated in the device either by enhancing the existing software or by a separate communication hardware. This hardware contains the complete hard- and software to communicate with the device and the maintenance server. If wanted the device is enabled by the software to report relevant data immediately to the server e.g. in case an error has occurred.
As two machines are exchanging information the SOAP protocol is used which combines:
- data is interpretable by machines in both directions
- common web-server may be used to avoid own developments
- XML parsers are available for most platforms
- no proprietary solutions as only standards are used
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