Patent ID: 8510732

Claim:
A system for distributed asset management, said system comprising: a) a plurality of data-collecting devices, each device being associated with one of a plurality of distributed assets under management by said system, each device having a processor, a memory, and at least one sensor for collecting data about the asset with which the device is associated, wherein the processor is configured to execute one or more embedded applications that are configured to receive the data collected by the at least one sensor, process the data locally, save processed data in the memory, and then transmit the processed data, wherein each device comprises a microkernel for managing the embedded applications on the device; b) a centralized data-processing and remote management infrastructure for interacting with the plurality of devices via the microkernel on each device, the infrastructure comprising an update server adapted to interact with the microkernel to dynamically update embedded applications while the embedded applications are still executing; and c) a network abstraction layer that enables communication between the devices in the system and the centralized data processing and remote management infrastructure wherein the update server is configured to hot-deploy an update to the embedded application on the device by downloading the update to the device and notifying the microkernel of the update, wherein hot-deploying comprises updating an existing embedded application using corresponding downloaded resources, and without terminating the operating system process.