Remote Control and Monitoring of Fire Alarm Systems

Most of the actual fire alarm systems used in small and medium size places in the market works as a standalone systems without the possibility of remote monitoring or configuration. This article shows a new development that provided for one hand, an Alarms and Events Reception System (AERS) that provide remote monitoring of fire alarm systems status based on a LabVIEW application and an additional hardware installed on the fire alarm system providing internet access. And on the other hand, the development of a web server embedded in the fire alarm systems providing system monitoring and configuration based on internet access. Introduction Nowadays, most of the fire alarm systems, figure 1, are installed in places where the system works standalone and are configured and managed locally. The possibility of remote management and monitoring using internet access open to fire systems manufactures different possibilities to extend the services given to final users. FIGURE 1. Fire Alarm System The development of a new alarms and events reception system using LabVIEW allows centralizing the management of a group of fire alarm systems providing information about real incidents, faults, manipulations, archive, etc... On the other hand, the fire alarm systems equipped with the new hardware with an embedded web server are able to be programmed and configured remotely thanks to a developed JAVA web page that provide direct communication with the fire alarm system. In that case, when the alarms and events reception system is receiving information from some fire alarm system, the operator is able to access the fire alarm system and monitor what is happening remotely in order to discard false alarms or provide confident information if a real problem is detected. System Description The aim of the project is provide internet access to commercial fire alarm systems in order to be managed remotely. The fire alarm systems are commercial off the shelf devices, and no firmware or hardware modifications are allowed. Then the additional software and hardware to be developed in the project has to take into account this restriction. In terms of hardware, the fire alarm systems taken into account has a TTL/RS232 comunication protocol that allow the local configuration. In order to provide remote access an RS232 to TCP/ IP interface has been added to the actual hardware. This component was the XPORT Direct+ from Lantronix. Thanks to this component the system is able to be connected to an IP network (LAN). The network configuration can be done by a web connection or using a serial terminal. The defalut configuration has to take into account the host IP address where the Alarms and Events Reception System is hosted. This configuration has to be done in all fire alarm systems in order to provide information to the Alarms and Events Reception System. The Alarms and Events Reception System has been develoed using LabVIEW 8.5, figure 3, and is able to manage different TCP/ IP connections from different fire alarms systems at the same time. The applications had implemented the original fire alarms systems’ protocol. The application registers and monitors all the events in function of the fire alarms systems’ model. FIGURE 2. Simplified