Wide-Area Data Acquisition System with a Precise Time Synchronization

The paper describes a data acquisition system developed in the Far Eastern State Transport University for the state monitoring of the geographically distributed systems. Currently this type of tasks often arises in the various sectors of industry and on the railroads. Using the modern hardware and software platform the prototype of the distributed monitoring system was designed. Various technologies were combined in one solution: sensor networks, microprocessors, data transmitters, wide-area networks, data warehouses, algorithms for data processing and visualization. When data arrive from remote nodes and most of the data contains the fast changing signal arrays, the efficiency of signal processing highly depends on the data synchronization. The main feature of the described system is full automation of the measurements with precision time stamps. It is based on light microprocessor platform operated by Python scripts. The distributed database allows building the united database nodes, which are located on the remote regional servers. The Python-based frameworks were used in order to operate the data in the mid-level and for client interface. The advanced math can be used for the data processing thanks to the precise data synchronization. The proposed approach seems to be very promising for the design of the monitoring systems for the power grids and for the railway infrastructure and rolling stock.