Ingersoll Rand are an air compressor manufacturer with installations around the world and a team of service engineers who support them.
More Solutions Ltd developed a web-based system to monitor compressor installations to enable Ingersoll Rand to respond quickly to problems if they occurred, and to provide remote access to compressor management information in a controlled way from anywhere with an Internet connection.
The system provides web-based real-time display of compressor setpoints and runtime information (such as pressures and temperatures), as well as monitoring alarms and storing historical data to allow trends to be displayed. Alarms can be used to trigger text messages or emails to engineers. In addition, set points can be changed by engineers as required (dependant on access level).
The system uses a custom Modbus protocol operating over the Internet (TCP/IP), and includes sophisticated gateway technology to allow devices to be reached across GPRS and other technologies which provide non-routable and non-static addressing making on-demand access to data otherwise impossible. The success of the system has lead to additional devices being added to the system alongside the compressors for which the system was designed. In all cases a template system allows rapid configuration of a new site based on the compressor model or device type.
Multi-tiered access levels allow clients to access all of their compressor information regardless of its location (without accessing information from other clients) whilst still allowing geographically based engineers to access data for the compressors local to them (regardless of the end user).