Fast Facts

Nominated for innovation

One of the products in the Instance range, the Static Impedance Monitor (SIM), was nominated by the Fire Industry Association (FIA) of the United Kingdom as a Fire Excellence Award finalist in 2009. FIA is a not-for-profit trade association which promotes the professional status of the fire safety industry in the United Kingdom. It runs a competition biennially to highlight new technology in the life safety industry. While the Instance product is not exclusively a life safety fire product, it conforms to the life safety criteria and therefore features prominently in the life safety market.

The SIM provides full signal redundancy by converting a single RS485 link into two RS485 links to ensure optimum performance of RS485 communication paths. One link is selected as the primary active link and the other as a monitored spare in the event of a primary failure. The links are routinely tested for system predictability. In the event of a fault on either of the two links, a fault condition is recorded and indicated visually through an electromechanical relay.

QoS (quality of service) focus

The Instance focus on the physical layer is a new approach to manage the QoS of industrial networks. The nature of various life safety industries necessitates a number of international specifications such as BS5839 part 1 (in Britain) and EN54 part 13 (in Europe and other parts of world that adopted EN54) to maximise communication continuity of networks. In some industries it is compulsory to provide redundant data paths.

To these ends the Instance products are invaluable with their focus on increasing the QoS of networks through redundancy and super-capable fault detection combined with visual display. Prolonged delays of physical fault detection by technicians are no longer necessary. Not only do these products enhance system uptime; they also cut the financial cost of time-consuming physical fault detection.

Quality system approval

Industrial communication design engineers are encouraged to use best practice system design by providing the correct amount of redundant spare communication channel links at all communication levels. This is essential to ensure that communication systems are designed for maximum uptime through the provision of multiple fault tolerance systems (MFT). Such design practice qualifies for the Instance Quality System Design approval (IQS).