Mechanical equipment is always subject to failure, but TUBES includes an alarm tracking system to help minimize downtime. TUBES offers suggested failure causes and repair procedures online, and its graphical display allows maintenance personnel to identify the location of problems more quickly. Tube system alarms can even be automatically forwarded to building alarm systems, pagers, etc. Meanwhile, TUBES' sophisticated real-time routing feature tries to reroute carriers around problems to get to their intended destination, back to the sender, or to a reject station.
Here a slidegate has gotten stuck and failed to open while receiving a carrier. With TUBES, you can see the station, the received carrier, the position of the slidegate, the nature of the problem, and probable causes all on one screen.