In the traffic management industry, it is essential that safety-critical and control systems work even in case of malfunctions. FLOW devices are often used for traffic control where continuous operation of devices and their reliability is key. Therefore, FLOW provides a bundle of safety and recovery features to ensure 100 % operability even when some unexpected events occur.
Autorecover (per individual analytics)
Autorecover functionality helps to make sure video data is being received and processed, fighting communication issues as well as errors on the NODE level. It can be set up individually for each analytics in their respective settings as shown in the picture below.
What does it do: Monitoring availability of the video stream and sufficient processing FPS
Why: The streaming can stop or FPS can drop due to issues with drivers or decoder on the host device. Reconnect may not resolve this and the only way to fix this is a complete restart of the system.
What happens: When the failure is detected, autosave will be executed on all of the analytics that have autosave enabled and then the FLOW device will restart.
Does it affect other analytics: Yes, as it is a software reboot of the device.
Default setting: Turned OFF
Recommendation: We recommend setting it up for all analytics that need to be continuously available.
Device availability: XRoads, Embedded, Drone
User permission requirements: admin, analyst
Autosave (per individual analytics)
Autosave is an important safety feature for protecting gathered data making sure that all historical data of widgets and data sinks that support historical data is saved at the specified intervals and therefore protected in case of power outages. On the other hand, if the power down of the device is not likely, you can either select big intervals for the autosave or leave this feature turned OFF as it does the write operation. Autosave feature can be set up for each analytic individually from the Analytics settings as shown in the picture below.
What does it do: If it is active, the history is automatically saved in the defined intervals and also in case when any of the safety features is triggered.
Why: Minimizes the impact of losing history data in the event of sudden power cuts, etc.
What happens: It saves historical data for all data outputs (sinks/widgets) that support the history feature. These include value, stat value, distribution, od matrix, state watcher (traffic lights state), and string. This is true for the same sinks types if you have the snapshotting policy turned on.
Refer to this article to learn more about how different time modes work in FLOW.
Does it affect other analytics: NO
Default setting: Turned OFF
Recommendation: We recommend turning this feature on for analytics that continually collects data and where this data is stored on the device for longer periods of time and data is not regularly downloaded. If it is not necessary for your specific application we recommend leaving this feature turned OFF because it generates unnecessary write operations of big amounts of data on the device's persistent memory.
Device availability: all FLOW devices
User permission requirements: admin, analyst
Additionally, autosave can be done at any time by pressing the “Autosave NOW” button.
Autoreboot (per FLOW device)
Regular Autoreboot can help to automatically recover from unexpected HW/SW errors. If you want to enable this feature, we recommend setting the reboot to be done at a time in which a short break in the analysis is not a problem. When setting this up we also recommend using it with autosave turned ON for all the analytics. Reboot settings are found under BLOCK settings as shown in the picture below. Be aware that the RAM will be cleared and thus the trajectory cache will be erased.
What does it do?: When activated, it performs an automatic SW reboot of the FLOW device in the specified intervals. Performs autosave of the analytics for analytics with enabled autosave before the reset.
Why: For automatic recovery from unknown errors of the SW/HW on the BLOCK level.
What happens: Autosave is done for the analytics with enabled autosave and then performs the SW reboot of the device.
Default setting: Turned OFF
Recommendation: We recommend turning this feature ON as a safety option for applications where the FLOW operation is critical and short disruptions have minimum impact on other systems.
Device availability: XRoads, Embedded, Enterprise, Drone, Cameras with DFS Linux
User permission requirements: admin
The minimum reboot period you can set is 5 minutes. You can perform a reboot at any time by clicking on the “Reboot NOW” button.
Summary
We hope that this article has helped you learn something new about the various safety features available for FLOW devices. If you have any questions you can use the button on the bottom right to get in touch with us or you can email us at info@datafromsky.com.
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Let the traffic flow with FLOW!