National Instruments Watchdog Agent Prognostics Toolkit for LabVIEW

The Watchdog Agent Prognostics Toolkit for NI LabVIEW expands the capabilities of LabVIEW in machine prognostics and health management (PHM) applications. The toolkit is a product of collaboration between NI and the National Science Foundation’s Industry/University Cooperative Research Center on Intelligent Maintenance Systems at the University of Cincinnati. It is designed for serving engineers’ increasing demand for monitoring and reporting the health status of machines, structures, components and systems.

The toolkit works with the advanced signal processing capabilities of LabVIEW and the analysis capabilities of the NI Sound and Vibration Measurement Suite. It provides a set of algorithms including logistic regression, statistical pattern matching, a self-organising map, a support vector machine and a Gaussian mixture model. Engineers can use these algorithms to create machine and component status descriptors of operating states and failure modes. The algorithms convert multiple field sensory readings into summarised health information values for efficient monitoring. The toolkit also includes a health radar chart that displays organised health values of multiple machine components on a single display.

In addition to integrating with the Sound and Vibration Measurement Suite, the Watchdog Agent toolkit can read history data collected from the NI measurement hardware including NI CompactRIO, CompactDAQ, PXI and PCI. It also integrates with the IOtech eZ-TOMAS Technical Data Management Streaming (TDMS) data plug-in, vibDaq from CalBay Systems or any other sensory data acquisition systems based on NI TDMS data files.