Patent ID: 7032019

Claim:
An information collection apparatus, which collects information via transmission paths from a plurality of information generation apparatuses, wherein each of said information generation apparatuses has a generation-side information storage unit which stores the information generated by said information generation apparatuses due to a specific generation factor, said information collection apparatus comprising: a table storage unit which stores a priority definition table in which respective priorities of said plurality of information generation apparatuses are defined; an information collection unit which refers to the priority definition table upon reception of a notice from an information generation apparatus that is any of said information generation apparatuses and in which an amount of information stored on said generation-side information storage unit of said information generation apparatus has reached a predetermined amount, where if the priority of said information generation apparatus is higher than a preset priority the collection unit responds to the notice by collecting the information stored on the generation-side information storage unit of said information generation apparatus, and where if the priority of said information generation apparatus is lower than the preset priority then the collection unit disregards the notice and does not perform collection for the notice; a collection-side information storage unit which stores the information collected by said information collection unit; and a substitution control unit which allows any one or more of said information generation apparatuses to act as a substitute to execute the operation of collecting information, that is supposed to be executed by said information collection unit, when a given error has occurred.