KnowHow: What you need to know about the latest Vizion updates

The latest release notes from the Vizion CMS now make it even easier to maintain, upgrade and report on your outdoor lighting network, in order to improve efficiencies and identify failures.

Throughout the UK there are almost 100,000 streetlights connected to the Vizion CMS, with enabling hardware (nodes and collectors) collecting and communicating valuable street lighting information for city leaders to review on their own CMS dashboard. The main advantage of Vizion is that it improves efficiencies by allowing users to monitor and control their outdoor lighting network wirelessly, from anywhere at any time (as long as there is an internet connection).

In the latest release notes for Vizion V2.4.5, improvements have been made to ensure reliability is enhanced and the possibility of input errors are minimised, throughout a number of areas on the Vizion CMS platform.  Below we explore the key points, to ensure you’re getting the most from your system and outdoor lighting network:

Administration

Feature: New Field Toolkit

Update: The main improvements here are sourced from a new feature that helps you (the user) carry out the process of replacing nodes with ease, when physically visiting the luminaire. This update can be found in the Field Toolkit menu, within the administration area and allows you to send a schedule of nodes to be replaced from the server to the new Field Toolkit, which can then be used to process the node replacement at the column. When the replacement has been processed by the Field Toolkit, the server is updated with old nodes removed and new nodes created.

Benefits: This update helps to save time, cut down the chances of input errors and improves the reliability of updates, shortening the time it takes from node replacement to a fully operational luminaire.

Feature: Integration with Mayrise

Update: After the integration of Mayrise as a compatible Asset Management System (AMS) in the last version of Vizion, there have been further improvements for better synchronisation and updates between the Vizion and Mayrise inventories. The list of fields updated with Mayrise data now includes ‘Street Name’.

Benefits: This helps you to locate and analyse data using the Street Name, giving you a better overview of communications and performance based on a number of variables that relate to the Vizion schemes within your network.

Feature: Clone Node Modifications

Update: The Clone process for nodes has been updated to take into account Spacial Diversity Providers (SDPs), ensuring nodes already set as an SDP which are to be cloned  with source node removed, are not created as an SPD.

In the instance of a node that is currently set as an SDP that is to be cloned, without removing the source node, the system will not create the new node as an SDP either.

Benefits: This new feature means that when cloning SDP nodes, data in relation to communication strength and performance is not misunderstood or raised as an event, making insights more accurate.

Reports

Feature: Node inventory – Additional Audit Fields

Update: Additional fields have been added to the Downloads area (Node Inventory KML and Node Inventory Reports) to assist with auditing node additions; these are “Created” and “Created By”.

Feature: SDP Comms Investigation Report

Update: This is a newly introduced feature (available in Downloads) that provides information about when or where nodes that are or were set as SDPs have dropped to 0% comms.

Benefit: This helps when trying to diagnose areas of poor comms performance.

Feature: Average SDP Stats Report

Update: Available in the Communications menu under Average SDP Communication Stats, the new report enables reports based on a specific time period. Reports are produced with average communications value as a percentage for all SDPs on the server at the time selected.

Benefit: This helps when trying to diagnose areas of poor comms performance and ensure the most appropriate nodes have been set up as SDPs.

Vizion 2.4.5 has also seen a number of maintenance updates in areas where incorrect or outdated information was previously displayed on the CMS interface. For more information about the above updates or maintenance items, please download the release notes here.