System Overview
A Fire Alarm Panel monitors the condition of your fire protection system (sprinklers, smoke detectors, etc). In the event of a fire, it sounds a local evacuation alarm and provides a signal to call the Fire Brigade. The fire alarm panel is also capable of sending other signals to verify its 'readiness' and assist with its maintenance.
Your Service Agent installs a CTU (supplied by AFAM) and connects it to your Fire Alarm Panel. The CTU monitors for any change in “state” (Fire, Defect, etc) from the Fire Alarm Panel and immediately sends a message to the AFAM Message Handling System (MHS), which then automatically sends a message to the New Zealand Fire Service (NZFS) or your Service Agent as appropriate.
To ensure reliability and robustness dual operating systems and signalling paths are employed throughout: (For more detail see Reliability_and_Security).
- The CTU normally communicates with the MHS via Vodafone’s GPRS (data) network and constantly sends “hand-shake” signals which the MHS acknowledges (that's how the CTU knows that its messages can always get through). If at any time the CTU fails to receive an acknowledge signal from the MHS (e.g. temporary GPRS path failure), it uses a “line grabber” to momentarily access a phone line to alert the MHS and send any subsequent 'fire' signals should they occur in this period.
- The AFAM MHS has dual servers as well as an 'Emergency' MHS (in a different geographic location).
- Communication between the MHS and the NZFS uses two separate dedicated parallel links, both of which are constantly monitored.
