Mobile Radiation Monitoring Solution

Business challenge

Our partner in this project - a vendor of different wireless sensors and integrated monitoring solutions has developed an integrated monitoring solution for one if its customers. Their client - a big chemical production company, operates facilities spread over a large territory. Initially client's engineering staff supporting these facilities was able to access monitoring data only from desktop computers. In order to allow its personnel to receive alerts from sensors and access monitoring data from any place the chemical company decided to deploy Wi-Fi network and equip employees with handhelds.

Solution

As a result, we developed the Mobile Radiation Monitoring Solution, which allows staff to monitor state of the radiation sensors in a factory floor and receive alarms wirelessly. Pocket PC based devices connect over Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11b) network to the data aggregation server. The handheld application allows users to put information updates such as equipment assessments back into the system. Events and alarms appear as flashing dot on the map of the production facility displayed on the screen of the Pocket PC device. All over-the-air communications between handhelds and the server are secured with WEP protocol and 128-bit SSL encryption. Integration with partner's sensor data monitoring server was made using Java and XML.

Software and Technologies: Pocket PC/Windows CE 3.0, MS Visual C++ for Pocket PC and Win32, SSL, IWC TrueMobility, TCP/IP, sockets, IEEE 802.11b, Java, XML.

Benefits

TrueMobility platform used for this solution enabled us to develop handheld part and communication transports with significantly lesser efforts. Sophisticated data synchronization algorithms and XML support incorporated in TrueMobility platform allowed to easily implement event delivery and data feed into mobile Pocket PC devices. We also developed facility maps support as a plug-in for TrueMobility Pocket PC client. As a result client's engineering staff stays always connected to the radiation monitoring system and receives real-time alerts which allow controlling the situation and protecting employees.