Practical Considerations for Designing a Remotely Distributed Data Acquisition System

As government and commercial entities continue moving towards a condition based maintenance approach for logistics, the need for automated data acquisition becomes vital to success. For the duration of this document data acquisition is defined as the means by which raw facts are gathered for transmission, evaluation, and analysis. Condition based maintenance is an advanced maintenance management mode, which helps avoid disrepair or excessive repair due to periodic maintenance, reduces maintenance cost, and also improves equipment reliability and availability. The analysis of critical system data minimizes the vulnerabilities of monitored systems, maximizes system availability, and concurrently produces a proactive logistics enterprise. This chapter discusses the design and implementation details of an adaptable automated data acquisition system DAS comprising several automated data acquisition nodes. Ideally, a versatile DAS design should have the capabilities to acquire and transmit data on key system test points in electronic or mechanical systems as well as provide the capacity for onboard data storage.