Principles of Operation

FAIM is designed to provide support for historical data storage and retrieval within the framework simulation environment only; therefore, it has different operational requirements from a historian designed to be used on a PAS.

For example, for simulation, users are concerned only with the recent history. They are not concerned with reviewing the data several days or weeks old for the trip analysis.

For these reasons, FAIM makes the following assumptions.

1. RTP data is only stored for a fixed (but configurable) number of simulation hours. By default, FAIM stores RTP data for eight hours of simulation run-time.

2. Only a specific (configurable) number of alarms are stored.

For RTP data, FAIM maintains a number of RTP database files. Each database file contains data for exactly one hour of elapsed simulation time. The number of files created and maintained by FAIM depend on the number of hours of history required, and the number of backtracks and the backtrack interval. The duration of available historical data is defined by the maxhist engine configuration parameter. For more information, see FAIM Engine Configuration Parameters.

For alarms, FAIM maintains a single database file that contains First-in First-out queue of alarm messages. By default, FAIM stores 5000 alarms, which is the default number of alarms displayed on the Alarm History display in FoxAlert. The number of alarms that the queue contains is specified by the maxalarm engine configuration parameter. For more information, see FAIM Engine Configuration Parameters.