Remote Diagnosis (RD)

Introduction

Near universal network connectivity has made it possible to remotely monitor business and mission critical equipment around the clock. With such monitoring solutions, companies are accumulating enormous amount of data from fielded equipment. However, manually processing this huge volume of data to assess equipment health or diagnose failures is neither feasible nor cost-effective. Consequently, this data is not effectively leveraged to reduce troubleshooting time and unscheduled downtime.

Companies need the ability to automatically infer equipment health and identify the Corrective Action in malfunctioning equipment, i.e., a true Remote Service Solution comprising of four essential elements:

1. Remote Data acquisition: Securely obtaining data from fielded equipment.
2. Remote Monitoring: Detecting alarm and error conditions.
3. Remote Diagnosis: Automatic processing of alarms and indicators to determine system health and identify needed corrective action(s). If available information is inadequate to identify the root cause and the corrective action, conduct additional drill-down remote (software-driven) or onsite tests (agent-driven).
4. Corrective Action: Executed remotely (for software problems) or onsite by local agents or dispatched FSEs (for hardware problems).

Remote Diagnosis stands in sharp contrast with the simpler task of continuous data monitoring and alarm management, which are often marketed as a Remote Diagnosis or Remote Service solutions. Without automatic Remote Diagnosis capability, service organizations are confounded by the multiple alarms and indications each fault generates, and cannot afford the substantial number of experts needed to manually diagnose the root cause and the associated corrective action. True Remote Diagnosis significantly extends data and alarm monitoring by extracting component-level health status of the equipment and identifies the necessary troubleshooting steps and corrective actions to get the equipment back on-line with minimal unscheduled downtime.

Technology

QSI’s real-time diagnosis tool, TEAMS-RDS, is derived from decades of work with NASA and has been proven in the Ares-1X and the International Space Station programs. TEAMS-RDS performs automated reasoning on the monitored data (error codes, indicators, alerts, etc.) from complex equipment to determine equipment health in fraction of a second. Thousands of equipment can be monitored and diagnosed simultaneously by a single TEAMS-RDS server. The resulting information can be presented in a browser-based health management dashboard, providing organizations with complete visibility on the health of their equipment.

Even in the most advanced equipment, the monitored data may provide sufficient information to narrow down the search space, but not enough to pin-point the fault and determine the corrective action unambiguously. In such situations, TEAMS-RDS powers drill-down diagnosis and guided troubleshooting to further reduce the ambiguity. If the equipment is so capable, TEAMS-RDS can instruct the remote equipment to perform additional automated diagnostic procedures, or it can guide a service agent at the remote service center through additional troubleshooting steps. In cases where physical access to the equipment is necessary, TEAMS-RDS can generate an optimized procedure to identify and fix the problem and send it to the Field Service Engineer (FSE). The FSE can use QSI’s PackNGo application to follow this procedure in a tablet or smartphone, ensuring seamless transfer of information from automated diagnosis to manual troubleshooting, thereby significantly reducing the troubleshooting time.

Projected Benefits