Casestudie Breakdown prediction Contell PILOT - Transumo

3 Current Monitoring Systems
The last chapter pointed out the existing problems of the temperature monitoring task
and limitations of the current approach of just setting critical temperature limits. This
chapter will introduce currently available monitoring systems to identify existing
problems. The main focus is kept on XiltriX, but section 3.5 will review other products
as well and will point out differences.
XiltriX is a monitoring system that is developed by the Dutch company Contell/IKS. It
consists of a combination of hard- and software, which realizes the basic tasks of
monitoring in the setting of medical laboratories. The basic idea is to attach sensors
to cooling devices and to collect the measurement data on a centralized web server.
In case of an exceeding of a predefined temperature limit, the system is able to notify
a person in charge locally and remotely by using flashlights or SMS for instance.
The basic development of this system started in 1991. In that year the company
IKS 13 published their first monitoring system. It was named JS and was built in
cooperation with several Dutch blood banks and aqua labs. During the years the
system was improved by implementing user made suggestions. After releasing JS 8,
JS 16, JS 32, JS 64 and JS 2000, IKS decided to rebuild the system completely by
using modern hard- and software possibilities and the gathered knowledge from the
JS development. This rebuild was published in 2003 as JS 2003. Beside the change
of name to XiltriX and some minor improvements, this version is still current state.
[Weerdesteyn06]
3.1 XiltriX’s Technical Basis
Figure 3-1 pictures a flowchart that introduces the general approach of most sensor
based temperature monitoring systems including XiltriX. First step of monitoring is
the collection of available data. Afterwards, this data is stored to a database for
documentation purposes. As described in section 2.3 the current state of a monitored
cooling device is only identified by comparing the current temperature to the
predefined critical temperature limits. As long as the measured temperature is within
the predefined limits the monitored device is classified as OK. Otherwise, the
monitored device is classified as malfunctioning and a person in charge is notified.
As monitoring is a continuous task in general, this procedure is repeated every time a
predefined time interval is exceeded. This is indicated by the black dashed line.
13 The companies Contell and IKS merged in January 2006
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