Reduced Costs through Virtual Walk-Testing


The importance of System Testing. The installation of safety, high security, building monitoring and fire detection systems is often carried out with a silo’d approach to design, choice of manufacturer, system maintenance and testing.

Cortech Open Innovation Event May 2015

With large and disparate estates spread geographically it is often very difficult to have an overall vision and state of awareness once the systems have been installed.

It is a widely recognised that equipment faults, breakdowns, defects and maintenance will occur during the operational life time of systems.  This can lead to serious breaches with regulation and potentially damage the reputation of an organisation.  Without a clear visual status of situation awareness, the impact of such defects from a silo‘d approach could lead to escalation of threat and risk.

There is a need and obligation to carry out both regulatory requirement testing and regular practical testing to ensure that any investment in systems is working correctly, whilst providing the necessary monitoring and control it was designed to perform.   End to end testing is the only way to ensure 100% testing, which is both time consuming and costly.

A Smarter Approach – Virtual Walk Testing

Systems integration will not only provide smarter interoperability between systems but will connect disparate systems together to a central core database, providing greater situation awareness and status.

Datalog 5 significantly helps to reduce the cost of testing by utilising intelligent software that carries out dynamic virtual walk-testing of systems in the background, during the normal day to day use of buildings.  This highlights devices which need to be tested, reducing the impact on resources and cost by enabling building owners to intelligently target the testing of those systems that are not operating as expected.  This also eliminates human frailty and achieves 100% integrity for testing regimes.

Easy to Setup – Easier to Monitor

The Virtual Walk-Testing Module provides two levels of individual point by point asset monitoring.  Level one sets a time period threshold for when you expect to receive confirmation of status change and reports any thresholds exceeded with a low level indicator. Level two sets a grace period (re-test, repair etc.) for any device. When this threshold is exceeded then a full alarm will be generated.  The Module is also supported by centralised logging and report facilities that can be searched to identify critical testing requirements.