All machinery, technology, electrical equipment and everything else that is man-made is destined to fail eventually given enough time and use. While failure rates are low and new improved ways to reduce failure are developed, the best way to handle the fear of failure in machinery is something called redundancy. Parking machine manufacturers understand this concept very well and apply it daily to their solutions.
What are Parking Machines?
Parking machines, otherwise known as automated parking or robotic parking, is a system that combines machinery, technology and computer systems to revolutionize the parking experience. Parking machines remove the human element from the majority of the parking duties. Parking machines are typically over 50% more space efficient than traditional parking garages, allowing more cars to be parked in half as much space. This is in large part due to the removal of ramps, drives, sidewalks, elevators and other pedestrian and traffic accommodations. Automated parking systems will become the norm for all parking in the near future.
Why Might Parking Machines Fail?
Parking machines are a combination of machinery to lift and place cars in spots, technology to guide the cars to the correct spots and computer systems to be the ‘brains' behind the entire system. Naturally, these components all have stress points. A piece of machinery may over the course of years weaken; technology and computer systems can sometimes have outages. Even something simple like the power going out can stop most machines and technologies in their place.
How do Parking Machine Manufacturers Handle this?
Manufacturers handle potential failure by building redundancy into each system. Redundancy is defined as a duplication of critical systems and components of a system. The intent is to increase the reliability through backups and fail-safes. Redundancy is commonplace in most households, such as in backing up a computer to an external hard drive or having duplicate copies of the same forms.
What Redundancies are in Parking Machines?
Typically, all crucial parts of a parking machine have a redundancy component. For example, should the power go out, most systems come equipped with multiple generators to power the parking systems for several days. Another example is the computer system, which typically has a second computer systems working in sync with the primary one – the data of each is constantly the exact same, but the second computer never truly commands the system unless the primary computer fails.
How reliable are Parking Machines?
With these redundant systems in mind, most parking systems have been able to operate at a nearly perfect uptime during normal operations. This means that parking machines nearly never fail and only in a situation where two or more of the exact same issues happen at the exact same time occur does the system go down. The probability of this failure of both primary and redundant systems is so incredibly low.
Parking machine manufacturers take great pride in building systems with redundancy built in to ensure that a system has a high statistical improbability of ever being out of operation.