Rod Nafisi, P.E. Email & Phone Number

Columbia, Md, Us

We founded Avista with the vision of providing solutions for the most challenging problems in the industry. Since 2007, we have helped our clients to overcome challenges and meet ever expanding requirements in the Industrial Automation field. These new requirements arise as IT and Operational domains overlap increasingly, making security, reliability and availability paramount factors in design and implementation.Our solutions range from developing systems from ground up to implement one of the largest and most complex Electric Distribution Automation Systems in the world to customized data communication links between systems. We are proud to have worked with many professionals in great companies such as:Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation AuthorityExelonUniversity of MarylandCornel UniversityFiji Electricity AuthorityUS Coast GuardAnd many more…As we progress into new areas and meet new people, we realize that our expertise is in higher demand by day. The industry is past the era that integrating off-the-shelf products could address the clients’ needs entirely. The industry needs firms that have great experience and knowledge in many subjects that touch Industrial Automation and that is exactly what we bring to the table.

Columbia, Maryland, Us

We founded IoT International in Jan of 2019. After couple of decades experience in the Industrial Automation field, we realized it is time to build technologies to help the clients to access their equipment data in a secure and easy way. This opens the way to better insight into the field process, respond intelligently to alarms and problems, analyze and find cause and effects in the system, and predict the system behavior. The core of our solutions supports both the Edge and the Cloud platforms: - At the Edge, our flagship product, RIoT Engine supports an open platform to incorporate any client (process) data interface and any server (cloud or on prem) service. The data on fly the is mapped from the clients to the servers in an intelligent way to preserve bandwidth and storage. In addition, using our Scripting Engine, you can write custom codes to process the data before publishing to the server services.- The customer facing platform is our SkyView, which is a portal that provides analytics, visualization and notifications based on the data collected from the field.Together, leveraging our technologies, organizations can build solutions to address their operation and production requirements. Here are a few examples of the systems we built or in the process of building using our technologies:Train monitoring systems; Train auxiliary power systems monitoring and analytics; Asset tracking and management; Booster pump monitoring, maintenance and analytics systems; FAA Smart Operation Center; Electric and Water utility monitoring systems …IoT International is a trusted partner in your next journey to improve your processes, increase reliability or boost your productivity by applying proven data collection and analytic technologies to your systems.

As my first project, I developed a Front End Application (FEP) for MOSCAD very quickly and ported it to C so people could configure the whole system via Excel. This paved the way for working with and creating data platforms for MOSCAD M and MOTOROLA IP Gateway. All of them worked very well and served the clients over the years. On a separate path, I was assigned to implement CDC type II protocol to convert data from a Modicon PLC to CDC type II. It gave birth to one of the first substation automation systems in the industry at the time. Moving on, I had a lot of fun with implementing many communication protocols such as Vancom, S9000, Modbus, DNP 3.0, ICCP, Conitel, etc. These products were installed in the following utilities: Baltimore Gas and Electric, Rochester Gas and Electric, Alabama Electric Coop, Entergy, First Energy, Progress Energy, and many more.At the final stages of my employment with the firm, I got to design and develop one of the largest and most advanced DA systems in the US that does many cool stuff such as Automatic Restoration over remote radio links, where I ended up designing and implementing an embedded box that works as a data concentrator with a lot of built in intelligence to manage low throughput communication. And, it is no fun if your device cannot be secured against eavesdropping and malicious attempts… so why not adding strong encryption and time based authentication? And that’s what I did and all of this on a low throughput data pipe riding on a lean network protocol so people can easily bring data from any corner of the territory without going through the pain of putting back to back radios or data concentrators on the path. Let me suffice that this little fellow is installed in many mission critical systems and has been serving its owners very loyally to this date saving tons of configuration and commissioning time and adding a lot to reliability. And this was just the beginning of the fun...

Masters, Telecommunication Management

Ms, Electrical Engineering