Data Storage for Remote Monitoring of Caterpillar Machines

To meet the next round of EPA emissions standards for non-road diesel machines and engines, Caterpillar is completing an unprecedented level of validation work for Tier 4 Interim designs. Part of this validation work involves testing new solutions in aggressive field follow programs. To reduce development time and cost, Caterpillar is using using "smart machine" technologies to record and wirelessly transmit data from the field back to Caterpillar facilities. This new remote monitoring technology presented a unique data management challenge since it was generating many times more data per machine than previous methods. More machines were being tested than ever before, and data sample rates were higher. To address the issue of rapidly-depleting data storage space, software engineers at Caterpillar developed a new compressible file format using the HDF5 libraries which was 90% less in size and could be processed 28% faster than the previous format. Since it could be natively read by other analysis software applications, this also eliminated the need for auxiliary file conversion processes and data storage. Caterpillar is now evaluating the full integration of the HDF5 libraries into its standard tool for data analysis due to the high-efficiency gains it has already observed.

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Last modified: 06/02/2017