Distributed Asset Management System and Method

• US 20090007098A1
• Filed: 02/21/2006
• Published: 01/01/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 02/22/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Connectif Solutions Incorporated
• Original Assignee: Connectif Solutions Incorporated
• Inventors: Chevrette, Guy, Duchesne, Yanick
• Granted Patent: US 8,510,732 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 717/177
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 8/65 Updates security arrangements therefor G06F21/57

Abstract

The present invention provides a method and system for managing remote applications running on devices that acquire, process and store data locally in order to integrate said data with heterogeneous enterprise information systems and business processes. The 5 system allows for remotely deploying, running, monitoring and updating of applications embedded within devices. The applications acquire, store and process data about assets that is eventually sent to a centralized data processing infrastructure. The system comprises an information integration framework that integrates the processed data with data that is extracted from heterogeneous data sources, in real-time, in order to create synthesized information.

Claims

1. A system for managing remote applications that process data in order to integrate said data with heterogeneous enterprise information systems and business processes, said system includes:

a) an infrastructure for deploying, running, monitoring and updating embedded applications within devices;

b) a network abstraction layer that allows communication between applications in the system; and

c) an information integration framework that allows integration of said data received from embedded applications with information extracted from heterogeneous data sources, in order to provide an integrated view of an organization'"'"'s asset.

2. The system of claim 1 wherein the devices further consist of a microkernel which manages the lifecycle of the embedded applications.

3. The system of claim 1 wherein the embedded applications further consist of applications that acquire, process and store data about assets.

4. The system of claim 1 wherein the network abstraction layer allows peer-to-peer, asynchronous communications as well as discovery, publishing and lookup of software services.

5. The system of claim 1 wherein the data processing infrastructure consists of asynchronous messaging server software, a data cache and data processing applications.

6. The system of claim 1 which further consists of a management infrastructure that is used to control the microkernels and applications within the remote devices.

7. The system of claim 3 wherein the embedded application may consist of a hub application interacting with a proxy server that itself communicates with one or more devices natively.

8. The system of claim 5 wherein the system consists of a functional specification and implementations thereof that are made available through the network.

9. The system of claim 7 wherein the management infrastructure includes an application update module that allows deploying embedded applications to remote devices.

10. The system of claim 9 wherein the application update module includes a server part, a set of programming instructions that interacts with the database used to store new applications and application updates, and a client part that is embodied by an embedded application that is deployed within the microkernels.

11. A method for managing remote applications that process data in order to integrate said data with heterogeneous enterprise information systems and business processes, said method including the following steps:

a) deploying, running, monitoring and updating embedded applications within devices;

b) using a network abstraction layer to ensure communication between applications in the system; and

c) using an information integration framework to integrate data received from embedded applications with information extracted from heterogeneous data sources, in order to provide an integrated view of an organization'"'"'s asset and trigger automated business processes.

12. The method of claim 11 for managing remote applications and process data, said method including the following steps:

a) installing a virtual machine and a microkernel within devices;

b) installing the devices on given assets;

c) deploying embedded applications to the devices;

d) processing and storing asset-related data at the embedded applications;

e) transmitting the said asset-related data to a centralized data processing infrastructure;

f) storing asset-related data into a data cache that is part of the centralized data processing infrastructure;

g) post-processing said cached data according to domain-specific logic;

h) creating an XML-oriented virtual database by integrating asset-related data of g) with data from heterogeneous data sources;

i) querying the virtual database of h) to obtain results; and

j) using the results to trigger automated business processes.

13. The method of claim 12 wherein deploying embedded applications involves uploading application resources to an update server using an administration console.

14. The method of claim 12 wherein deploying embedded applications requires the update clients to poll an update server for new deployments, and to install these deployments.

15. The method of claim 13 wherein installing deployments consists of downloading them from the update server using the network abstraction layer and notifying the microkernel so that it proceeds to the hot-deployment.

16. The method of claim 15 wherein hot-deployment consists of starting a new application or updating an existing application using the corresponding downloaded resources, and without terminating the operating system process.

17. The method of claim 16 wherein updating an existing application involves stopping it and starting the new application corresponding to the newly deployed resources at its place.

18. The method of claim 12 wherein processing and storing asset-related data at the embedded applications consists of locally processing and storing data until it can be transmitted to the centralized data processing infrastructure.

19. The method of claim 12 wherein transmitting asset-related data involves remotely connecting to the centralized data processing infrastructure using the network abstraction layer, and sending the data to the infrastructure using the said connection.

20. The method of claim 19 wherein the data is received by the centralized data processing infrastructure by means of an asynchronous messaging server software and forwarded to a data cache.

21. The method of claim 12 wherein integrating data consists of presenting heterogeneous data sources as sources of XML documents.

22. The method of claim 12 wherein heterogeneous data sources are integrated in realtime without creating a physical database or data-warehouse.

23. The method of claim 12 wherein the virtual XML-oriented database is queried using the XQuery language.

24. The method of claim 23 wherein the result of the query is a set of XML documents that can themselves be further integrated, aggregated and queried.

25. The method of claim 24 wherein the result of the query is made available to client applications in the form of web services, HTML web pages or any output required by client applications.

26. The method of claim 12 wherein triggering automated business processes involves orchestrating information integration web services with high-level business process definition languages, such as BPEL, in order to implement domain-specific logic.