IR-GIS ®

IR-GIS ® is an Innovative Realtime Geographic Information System providing high performance display of real-time position and event data in a 2D system.

We are still developing IR-GIS ® and we are working around the Usage Scenario diagram in a clockwise direction. The next aspect we are developing is Command-and-Control and Event Processing.

Design

Deliberately designed to scale:

• IR-GIS ® is designed to handle large volumes of data while remaining responsive to user input.
• Data can be sourced from multiple inputs and presented in multiple layers to suit the user’s requirements.
• Multi-threaded design takes advantage of today’s multicore CPUs meaning a high performance experience for the user.
• Direct input of the network data to the viewer means the system has a high degree of fault tolerance and scalability with no central server (bottleneck) required.
• An archiving server is available to capture all traffic for later display and analysis in conjunction with the viewer.
• Multi-platform capable allowing use on Windows ®, Linux and Solaris ® based systems.

Applications

Position based information display.

Ideal for processing small to very large scale vehicle tracking messages, such as:

• Shipping
• Truck lines
• Buses
• Taxis
• Emergency services
• Transport companies
• Air Traffic Control systems
• Situational awareness displays

Event based information display.

Allows events to be represented in real time, such as the input from a network of sensors. This allows applications such as:

• Alarm systems
• Weather monitoring systems
• Process monitoring
• Emergency service monitoring
• Distress system monitoring

Control and Monitoring.

In addition to event monitoring, two way communications allow the system to get the status of remote equipment on demand, and to send commands to the remote equipment. For example:

• Process control
• Security systems
• Control of remote equipment

Data Capture and Analysis

A high performance archiving server has been developed as part of the system. All incoming traffic can be stored for later analysis. Search tools can provide time, location and feature based searches with fast response times. This can provide, for example:

• Movements of a specific vehicle at a certain time
• History of data from a sensor (such as temperature over time)
• Time and location of an event

Features

Rich capability:

• Built as Rich Client Platform plugins to the Open Source udig code base, using eclipse, apache projects and Java.
• Incorporates Open Standards: OGC, XML and JMS.
• User extensible real-time message format (to be published soon).
• Multiple file load and save formats: xml, KML, CSV and others - via plugin extension points.
• Map layer sources offer: real-time tracks and position reports, ESRI ® shape files, images, databases, and can use Open Geographic Consortium compliant Web Feature Service and Web Map Service servers.
• Complete multi-threaded design to take advantage of modern CPU architectures.
• Multi-threaded, high performance, highly scalable real-time live data position display.
• Concurrent and multiple real-time live data layers coexist with concurrent traditional map layers.
• All map layers, including the real-time layers are styled using the Style Layer Descriptor OGC standard.
• SLD provides dynamic Styling for the real-time layer on the fly.
• Real-time data is fed directly to IR-GIS ® via Java Messaging Services - specifically Apache ActiveMQ.
• JMS supports failover and load balancing.
• Extensible message formats with attributes visible in the Info selection Tool and participating in the display styling.
• The IR-GIS ® client contains a tracker that can associate unidentified position reports (dots) with features (vehicles) by correlating the attributes, time and location with previous position reports.
• Highly configurable views and perspectives.
• Multiple real-time message streams can be recorded by a central Historical Pullback Server (HPS) in real-time
• The IR-GIS ® client can use the HPS via a query interface to visualise historical messages - just like real-time messages - for post event analysis.
• The HPS Query Interface offers: time, region and free-text searches (and we are considering exposing the HPS API).
• Additional plugin tools are provided within IR-GIS ® to replay and filter historical data to aid analysis.
• The HPS is efficient, multi-threaded and has a smaller CPU footprint than traditional relational and text-search databases.
• Maps and their layers may be composed into reports that can be exported to image formats or printed or converted to PDF.
• A templating system is provided to permit users to import and arrange images and text to decorate and brand their reports
• Our products use purpose built collections which return memory to the operating system when the memory is not required, and Reference caches permitting the garbage collector to optimise the memory footprint.
• Our products have neither memory nor resource leaks for sustained operations.
• Maps can be sourced from providers on request.
• Additional plugins available on request.
• Australian based support and development.
• IR-GIS ® is able to be customised to your requirements.

Technical Background

Technical details are available in the Product Sheet

Performance specifications

Rendering Times (draw, ATC, TRACKS) are recorded in milli-seconds, memory utilisation in bytes, frequency in Feature Position Reports per second. The red line is the total number of reporting positions displayed - with aging turned on, and X-axis is the time in fractions of day, and draw is the total drawing time to render all the real-time layers. Note the layers are Rendered in parallel.

IR-GIS ® processes and archives input messages in real-time, both for display and historical archive and pull-back. We support the same speeds for archive and display - the design goal is 1200 Reports per second with an average of 96 bytes per real-time message.

Semantically equivalent forms of messages are employed for archive and dispay, and our messages attributes are characterised into:

• identifying attributes,
• amplifying details and,
• kinematic data

and represent quite compact formats that are user extensible. Any additional attributes supplied in the input message stream are automatically available in the viewer, and automatically presentable in the infoTool, without the need to code any changes.

Why would you use the IR-GIS ® product suite?

We have sucessfully sold a collection of Historical Pullback Servers, floating Licence Server and numerous IR-GIS ® real-time client licences to the Australian Department of Defence, where the product suite is successfully handling a high level of operational traffic.

We will be progressively including more features in the product suite over time, and we expect to expand our customer base, because we believe our system is the only GIS product capable of handling our real-time target throughputs.

Although the product line is general, it is also configurable, and can be tailored to each customer's mission - if and when desired.

Contact Details

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IR-GIS ® is composed of plugins designed to operate with the Open Source udig product developed by netrefractions http://udig.refractions.net/
ESRI ® and ArcMap ® are the registered trademarks of ESRI www.esri.com.
Windows ® Microsoft www.microsoft.com
IR-GIS ® Arising Technology Systems Pty Limited www.arising.com.au