AggreGating Your Devices
By Erez Zukerman
These days, everything is “smart”. We’ve got “intelligent cars”, “smart homes” and great industrial automation processes.
But for some reason, as smart as your car may be, it’s still won’t turn on the lights in your home as you come up the driveway. Chances are that even if you have a Smart Home system installed, you still have to dial a number or send an SMS to control systems.
Why can’t all of these “smart” systems just get along?
This is where AggreGate comes in. If your Smart Home and your intelligent car were two pieces of bread in a sandwich, AggreGate would be the peanut butter holding it all together.
AggreGate can get inputs from multiple systems, and send outputs back to those same systems (or different ones). It is Java-based, so it runs on just about any modern operating system.
With its native drivers and extensions, it may be used for network management. It can also communicate with sensors, on-board vehicle controllers, industrial controllers and a host of other gear. This makes it a natural fit for SCADA/HMI, access control, building automation, fleet management, or any creative combination of these you can think of.
Of course, real life isn’t always as neat as technical demos, and sometimes connections break. Some systems are not even meant to maintain stable connections – let’s say you have a forklift at a factory, and it drives out of wireless range. Then what?
AggreGate was built from the ground up for such circumstances exactly. An extensive (and, if we may say so ourselves, intelligent) caching system exists to maintain device settings on the server side, and synchronize them as soon as the device comes into range.
AggreGate is also a multi-user system. User permissions reflect business roles: An accountant may view personnel attendance reports (from the integrated time and attendance system), but may not add or remove users, for example.
This is but a tiny bit of what AggreGate may do, but we hope we’ve managed to pique your curiosity. Please feel free to visit us at http://aggregate.tibbo.com and take the system for a spin!
Erez Zukerman is a technical writer for Tibbo Technology Inc.
