Facility Monitoring System Taiwan

Project Introduction: In order to train soldier responsiveness while under duress, fatigue, and facing the uncertain conditions that occur during wartime, Taiwan recently established a simulation facility to imitate the various circumstances that soldiers face during war. Soldiers are highly monitored during the process to measure reactions, observe mistakes and improve performance and overall responsiveness.

System Requirements:

Clear thinking and remaining calm under duress is everything in war. The Taiwan government was looking for a system to help them monitor soldier responsiveness, and had the following requirements:

• Independent Remote I/O Modules: The facility is a two floor building with different rooms that have different equipment (such as weapon ranges, gas vents, and audio speakers). The DAQ modules need to have different channels separated across different simulation rooms for different purposes.
• Quick Response Times: Once the soldiers enter a simulation room, the equipment needs to receive signals and send them out immediately in order to effectively monitor the soldiers’ reactions.
• High Sampling Rates: All of the installed IP cameras need to be networked through Ethernet, requiring 15M bandwidth per camera to record the reactions of each soldier during the training center

Project Implementation:

	ADAM-6060	6-ch Digital Input and 6-ch Relay Module
	ADAM-6024	12-ch Isolated Universal Input/Output Module
	ADAM-6050	18-ch Isolated Digital I/O Module
	EKI-7656C	16+2G Combo Port Gigabit Managed Redundant Industrial Ethernet Switch
	EKI-7758F	4G+4 SFP Gigabit Managed Redundant Industrial Ethernet Switch
	ACP-4000	4U Rackmount Chassis with Visible & Audible Alarm Notification
	PCE-5124	LGA775 Core 2 Quad CPU Card with PCI Express / IPMI / VGA/ Dual GbE LAN / 6 COM Ports

System Diagram:

System Description:
In the simulation center, there are several rooms to test soldier response to different situations that can occur on the battlefield. These include (non-lethal) gas, electric shocks, gunfire, blast sounds, and different lighting effects. Thus, these rooms need to be installed with various monitoring equipment and I/O modules to control these events. As shown in the system diagram, there are 33 industrial PC platforms (ACP-4000 with PCB-5124 motherboards) in the center room used to control I/O operations as well as monitor soldier status. The main network is made up of six EKI-7758F switches which establish an X-Ring for redundant functionality. The ADAM-6060, ADAM-6024, and ADAM-6050 connect to the main network through the EKI-7656C switch. The main purpose of ADAM-6060 (digital input and relay module) is used to control the gas, electric shocks and other different effects, while ADAM-6050 (isolated digital I/O module) is used to control lighting. The loudness and rotation speed of the guns are controlled by the analog input/output module, ADAM-6024. EKI-7656C is connected to 60 IP cameras used to monitor soldier reactions.

Conclusion:
Advantech’s X-Ring redundant architecture maximizes communication reliability, and the whole system is seamlessly connected with Advantech’s Ethernet-based remote I/O modules, ADAM-6000 series, to access real-time data from the field. Advantech provided a total solution for this project, from controllers and communication solutions to remote I/O modules, saving the government from configuration and greatly shortening development time. What’s more, after implementation of this initial simulation facility, the government was really satisfied with the overall performance of the system, and plans to roll it out across other facilities across the island.