Design and development for a fuel tank monitoring system.

Our client, a leading environmental company in the UK, contracted Emutex to design and develop the software for a fuel tank monitoring system comprising of hundreds of fuel tank monitoring devices installed across the UK and a central management system (CMS) to administrate and monitor them all.

Emutex assisted in the hardware design and part selection of the compute hardware for the fuel monitoring telemetry device. We designed and developed the embedded Linux software for the device and the software for the Linux server based CMS. The fuel tank monitoring devices leverage secure, reliable and proprietary communication protocols to regularly acquire readings from liquid level sensors integrated within fuel tanks and to communicate that data back to the central management system (CMS) via the public telephone network (PSTN). The CMS archives, analyses and reports all data from which administrators determine the rates of fuel consumption and stock levels. Any unusual patterns are alerted, e.g. sudden drops in fuel levels may indicate dangerous leakage or theft. The CMS is also used to remotely administrate and perform regular health-checks of all monitoring devices including any firmware upgrades.

During this project Emutex worked with a variety of technologies in developing the entire solution. For example, on the embedded client side it involved working with ARM9 based single board computers, Linux, PSTN Modems, digital/analog converters (DAC), I/O sensors, custom remote management protocol over TCP/IP and SSH/SSL. On the server side Emutex Engineers worked with an Enterprise Linux Server, Oracle SQL, modem channel banks, SSH/SSL and a WebLogic Application Server. Code including C, C++, Java, JSP, JavaScript, HTML and CSS.