Volume 10, Number 5 • September/October 2002 • Small Business/SBIR

SBIR-Developed Software Goes a Long Way

The Ring Buffered Network Bus DataTurbine provides multi-site streaming data access, both real-time and historical, with collaborative processing.

A 1999 Software of the Year honorable mention and recipient of a 2000 R&D Magazine R&D 100 Award, the Ring-Buffered Network Bus (RBNB) is an example of an SBIR that has grown from its original use. Developed by Dryden Flight Research Center, with Creare, Inc. of Hanover, NH, the RBNB is software that is helping to tame the vast amount of information flowing through the Internet. Called the RBNB DataTurbine®, it provides multi-site streaming data access, both real-time and historical, with collaborative or on-the-fly processing capabilities. The software adds memory to network communications and facilitates time correlation of distributed data sources. It also enables and facilitates remote monitoring, data distribution, application integration and interactive data processing between multiple data sources and sinks.

Intended for creating networks of measurements and distributed measurement processing, DataTurbine is a software server that provides a buffered network path between suppliers and consumers of information. This buffering mechanism goes beyond traditional file-based sharing technologies by adding a time dimension to the data. By incorporating DataTurbine-based management into Web and application services, the integration of static and dynamic information is greatly simplified. In addition, the ability to organize DataTurbines into hierarchies and layers facilitates deployment of scalable virtual networks for specific users or uses.

The applications of an Internet-based management tool such as DataTurbine are numerous. It can be used for manufacturing process control, medical and physiological management, business and commercial on-demand
multimedia data streaming, distance learning, scientific data processing and enterprise process automation.

The software also shows promise for making air travel safer by offering a solution for meeting the often-conflicting goals of providing high-performance data acquisition and quick access to those data by many users. By effectively storing live data and analysis of that data in the network, the construction of situational awareness and decision support tools for pilots, air traffic management, maintenance personnel and others is made easier. The DataTurbine has been involved in advanced experiments for NASA’s Aviation Safety Program and is also involved in developing systems architectures for intelligent vehicle health management on manned or autonomous vehicles.

Using this technology, entire fleets of aircraft may someday be able to communicate with each other and with ground-based facilities through interoperable on-board and open-air data networks. Flight data recorders, known as black boxes, could be augmented with DataTurbine-enabled network services.

Dryden also has initiated a project with Creare to develop a suite of Java-based object-oriented software tools to aid the design, analysis, implementation and use of cost-effective distributed health-management systems, using RBNB. While object-oriented paradigms with graphical interfaces are revolutionizing many fields, distributed health monitoring evolves toward intelligent decision-support systems involving sensors, signal processing and a consequential need to analyze both current and historical data from a number of often-changing data sources and types. Timely access to machinery health information leads to increased operational efficiency.

For the medical industry, RBNB is a useful tool for systems integrators and application developers. Application examples include adapting live telemedicine environments to couple video-on-demand with other sensor-history-on-demand capabilities, implementing temporary source-side measurement storage services for later transmission across intermittent links and building new integration, fusion and data management capabilities into Web-based emergency response infrastructure.

“The DataTurbine is a step toward vastly easier integration and interoperability for decision-making support tools,” says Larry Freudinger, Dryden’s lead engineer for measurement and telemetry network applications, and co-developer of the DataTurbine software. Q

For more information, contact Larry Freudinger at Dryden Flight Research Center, phone: 661/276-3542, l.freudinger@dfrc.nasa.gov. Please mention you read about it in Innovation.Innovation.

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