Reconfigurable Industrial Sensors for Remote Condition Monitoring and Modeling

The objective of this paper is the development of a software architecture to ease access and management of data for applications with variable and configurable data sources. The purpose of this architecture is to build a configurable and flexible system where acquisition tasks are decoupled from data-access tasks. To accomplish this, the authors have implemented what they have called virtual acquisition cards , which provide a reconfigurable and dynamic view during runtime of the data required by the user applications. These data can be used by different kind of applications from diverse knowledge areas (meteorological, industrial, medical, and so on) for the analysis of behavioral models or condition monitoring. This paper introduces the architecture of the system proposed with its involved parts. Then, it details the most important parts of the system and how they work. Next, several real working applications, using the proposed architecture, are shown. A discussion about other existing commercial systems is made, and finally, future works and conclusions are presented.