Alarm Display Method Using Size and Position Encoding
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Solution Overview
Problem
Traditional alarm presentation methods, such as lists, overwhelm operators with hundreds of alarms, making it difficult to identify and prioritize important alerts in automation systems, and existing graphical representations do not effectively help operators decide which alarms to address first.
Innovation Solution
A method and apparatus that represent alarm events as graphical objects in a user interface, where the size and position of each object are determined by properties like age, state, and priority, allowing operators to visually assess importance and prioritize alarms based on a two-dimensional or three-dimensional diagram.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of information
If alarm events are presented in a traditional list format, then all alarm information can be displayed, but it becomes difficult for operators to identify and prioritize important alarms among hundreds of alerts
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies color coding to graphical objects representing alarms, where different colors indicate different priority levels or states. This allows operators to quickly distinguish important alarms from less critical ones at a glance, resolving the contradiction between displaying all alarm information and enabling easy prioritization.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent transitions from a one-dimensional list format to a two-dimensional graphical interface where alarms are represented as objects with varying sizes and positions. The size dimension encodes priority information, allowing operators to identify important alarms immediately without sifting through lengthy lists, thus maintaining information completeness while dramatically improving ease of prioritization.
2Difficulty of detecting and measuring
If graphical representations with clustering are used to analyze alarm causes, then spatial pattern recognition is facilitated, but operators still cannot easily decide which alarms to address first
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies different visual properties to different aspects of alarm representation: size indicates priority level, position indicates spatial or temporal relationships, and color indicates state or category. This local differentiation of visual qualities allows the same graphical interface to simultaneously support cause analysis (through spatial clustering) and prioritization decisions (through size-based encoding), resolving the contradiction between these two operational needs.
Data Source
AI summary
There is provided a method for displaying alarm events to an operator. Alarm events, each being associated with the properties age, state and priority, are received from an alarm generating system. The alarm events are represented by graphical objects which are displayed in a graphical user interface. The sizes of the graphical objects are determined based on at least two of the properties being associated with the alarm event, and the position of the graphical objects is related to the size of the graphical object and/or one or more of the properties being associated with the alarm event represented by the graphical object.