Research organisations run on projects, measurements and records. Programmes have to be planned, staffed, budgeted and reported; instruments and rigs have to produce data that can be trusted; procedures, versions and results have to remain traceable years after the work was done. VISION builds software and instrumentation for both halves of that.
We work as a software and technology company: business analysis and process design, custom software development and platform configuration, hosting and infrastructure, and IoT devices, sensors, electronic modules and hardware prototyping. In a research setting that means the same team can take a requirement from the process as it is written down to the sensor on the test rig.
Partner in the ALFRED project
Vision Technology Development is a partner in the ALFRED project, the Advanced Lead Fast Reactor European Demonstrator, one of Europe's programmes in Generation IV nuclear energy. The demonstrator reactor is planned for construction at Mioveni, Romania, and the programme sits under the European Sustainable Nuclear Industrial Initiative.
VISION contributes expertise in IoT technologies, hardware development and electronic prototyping: IoT ecosystems optimised for industrial and nuclear conditions, so that data collection stays reliable in extreme environments; advanced industrial sensors developed to measure oxygen concentration in molten metal and built to resist high temperatures; device management and smart electronic modules that bring transducers and protocols such as Modbus, TCP/IP and LoRaWAN into one acquisition and control solution; and support for prototyping laboratories, with instrumentation and software for testing critical components.
Laboratory and measurement data
Readings from instruments, rigs and test benches are held against the asset that produced them, with their timestamp, unit and parameters, so values can be compared between runs, between installations and between periods.
Thresholds raise a notification on their own. Dashboards and interactive maps show the state of an installation per audience, and the underlying series stay available for analysis and export.
Projects, budgets and timesheets
Projects, work packages and deliverables are held with their planned and actual effort. Timesheets record time against the project and the task it belongs to, budgets follow commitments and spend by line, and procurement requests pass through an approval route before they become orders.
Reporting to a funding body or a programme office then draws on the same records as the day-to-day work, so the figures in a report and the figures in the system are the same figures.
Documents, procedures and traceability
Protocols, procedures, drawings, test reports, contracts and correspondence are filed in one document store, with versions, access rights per role and a change history. Practically every entity carries a record of who changed what, with the old value and the new one.
That record is what makes a result reproducible and an audit answerable, and it keeps the operational knowledge of a project in the system when the people on it move on.
Built around your processes
Vision App Maker is the configuration platform behind this work, used in more than 100 implementations across a range of industries. Data structures are defined in a visual designer, with types, cardinalities, lists, parameters and entities; forms and responsive interfaces are generated from them; business rules are written in a rules engine usable by anyone comfortable with spreadsheet formulas; and workflows are drawn in a visual editor. Integrations with existing systems are added through a plugin mechanism.
A research organisation's processes change with each programme, each funding scheme and each new piece of equipment. The configuration is changed to match, so the system keeps describing the way the work is actually done.
