Overview
When Witness generates events, such as alarms, or processes targets, it passes all this information to the Integration Manager. The Integration Manager is then able to use loaded plugins such as ICD-001 to convert this information into a suitable data format to send to external systems. In this case the plugin converts the data to XML message which are transmitted over a TCP/IP connection.
The data is transmitted as the events occur, leading to real time reporting.
Installing the ICD-001 Plugin
Witness supports integration with many different types of external systems through the use of plugins. These are stand-alone software libraries which are dynamically loaded by the Integration Manager and contain code which knows how to convert the Witness data into the required format for the external system. Navtech Radar can easily develop bespoke plugins to interface with a specific type of equipment or application, however ICD-001 has been developed to provide a comprehensive communication protocol which is based on open standards in order to make it as easy as possible to integrate with a large number of different systems.
The plugin can be selected during setup and will automatically be installed in the correct location.
When installing Witness, in the Choose Components page of the Witness Setup wizard, open Integration Plugin options and select ICD001:
Configuring the ICD-001 Plugin
When the plugin is installed and licensed, a plugin configuration with default settings is automatically generated.The settings can be viewed and edited by enabling the Config Function, then selecting the plugin in Integration Configurations, within the Configuration Tree. Configuration settings will then be available in the Configuration Panel.
Once you have made changes to the plugin configuration and committed the changes by saving, the plugin will automatically restart itself based on the new configuration. Note that any connections to 3rd party systems will be dropped during this restart.
The setting options are as follows:
Enable Plugin: when enabled the plugin will start and will always start when the Witness system starts. When disabled the plugin will stop and will not start until re-enabled.
Plugin Name: user friendly name of the plugin.
Track Output Mode: sets the track output filter:
None - no tracks reports are sent.
Broken Rule - report all tracks which have broken rules, regardless of whether this resulted in an alarm.
Alarm Only - report only tracks which have broken rules that results in an active alarm.
All - reports all tracks.
Buffer Tracks: when enabled this will force tracks to be buffered and sent in batches based on the Track Buffer Timer. This can optimise network load but has the drawback of not sending data in real time. The Track Buffer Time setting specifies how often the buffered tracks are sent.
Send Status: when enabled this will trigger status reports to be sent at a regular interval based on the Status Report Time. In addition it allows status reports to be sent when any status changes (i.e. health or system profile). This also enables support for the Request Status Command which provides the capability for external systems to request status reports.
Send Alarm: when enabled, Alarm reports will be sent when alarms are raised.
Send Size Classification Report: when enabled ClearWay Size & Classification Reports will sent if Traffic Analysis is enabled.
Track Buffer Timer (s): period of time between each batch of tracks being sent if Buffer Tracks is enabled.
Heartbeat Timer (s): the interval at which heartbeats are sent to the connected clients.
Status Report Timer (s): the interval at which each status report is sent. when the Send Status option is enabled.
If you want to enable the status report mechanism but do not want to send regular automatic reports then you can set the Status Report Timer to 0 (zero).
Monitor Client Health: when enabled, the plugin will monitor the health of client connections. If a client is either not connected or connected but not sending heartbeats, then an alarm will be raised in Witness. The client most support sending heartbeats to Witness to use this option.