Patent ID: 6847305

Claim:
A method allowing a distributed population of retail fuel stations to provide at least one remote party with a “snapshot” of the in-tank fuel levels of the bulk fuel tanks of all the retail fuel stations in said population as well as data obtained from some other on-premise device or sensor, comprising the steps of: configuring a distributed population of retail fuel stations as data-origin parties of in-tank fuel level data from the on-premise bulk fuel tanks as obtained from controllers of automated tank gauges (ATG's) as well as being an origin of data obtained from some other on-premise device or sensor; providing each data-origin party with an on-premise data communicator that has a processor and memory and is associated with and cyclically polls at least one on-premise ATG controller and at least one on-premise some other device or sensor for data thereof, and pre-programmed with a cyclic schedule and stores locally in the memory at least several cycles worth of such polled data; providing a communications network having intermediate storage and a given message-switching message-propagating technology; providing a data-destination party with a message-switching address; each data communicator in the population programmed with a schedule containing appointed times such that at any given appointed time, each independently but essentially simultaneously executes an instruction set for the propagation of a data message over the communications network by means of the given message-switching message-propagating technology and as addressed to the data-destination party, which data message contains a historical record of the polled data of at least the current cycle and as polled from the associated at least one on-premise ATG controller and at least one on-premise some other device or sensor: whereby after some time lapse that affords the data messages of the population opportunity to propagate their own independent way through the network and reach, not all at the same instant, the address of the data-destination party, then the data-destination party affords research into the data on a “snapshot” basis for that given time and successively for successive given times.