But ten heads without wit, I wene as good none..

Single Headed Redundancy

All animal mammal life, including human life has a great deal of symmetry and therefore headwise redundancy of sensory input.  Yes we only have one mouth, but we do have two eyes we have two ears and we have two nostrils... also apparently two brains in one as well.  So apparently Apollo had a redundant twin sister, Artemis.  Diversity in power, the power of two gods being better than one, or even take one if not the other.

"Some heades haue taken two headis better then one: But ten heads without wit, I wene as good none." - 16century Proverb.

 Artemis : flickr photo attributed to Efthimiadis.

In this post we can look at the overall aspect of redundancy where we have redundant measurements providing signals to redundant local real-time processors.

Last invensysscada blog post if you recall, discussed configured processing rather than programmatic processing.  In this post I hope to show how those same intrinsic data functions can be used in real-time to resolve the choice of measurement based on reach-ability and a configured priority.

The Remote Gate Diverse System

'Cloud Gate' - Millenium Park Chicago

Today's blog post is inspired by Anish Kapoor's beautiful 'Cloud Gate' in Chicago.    It is a public sculpture to play and interact with in any weather.  I aim to go see it touch it with one finger and look at the city go by one day. The blog post itself is just like that - a single touch to a gate of the kind of diverse engineering which takes place at remote locations. [The photo courtesy of  Lisa Yarost.]

Most people think of remote terminal units and remote systems as an atomic black box, doing a certain job, somewhere far off, with a means to communicate. The black box has become a citadel, a complex arrangement of interacting intelligent devices which need a gate through which to communicate.

What does it look like inside that far off citadel, and what kind of architectures support it ?.  What follows is a brief introduction to the story of the development of the Gated Diverse Architecture.