Communications Bridge Alarm Normalization for Building Monitoring
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Solution Overview
Problem
Building management systems face challenges in efficiently managing and responding to a large number of alarms from disparate domain systems, leading to cluttered displays and difficulty in comprehending and resolving alarms effectively.
Innovation Solution
A communications bridge normalizes and labels alarms from various domain systems, deleting duplicates and labeling repetitive alarms as noise, using a common data structure and alarm IDs, and providing these to a cloud computing system for efficient processing and visualization.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If alarms from multiple domain systems are collected and monitored, then comprehensive facility monitoring is achieved, but alarm clutter and difficulty in resolving alarms increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent combines alarms from multiple disparate domain systems into a unified alarm feed processed by a single communications bridge. This merging approach maintains comprehensive monitoring capability while consolidating alarm data into a manageable format that reduces clutter and improves operator efficiency in resolving alarms.
Solution Approach 2:
The communications bridge acts as an intermediary between multiple domain systems and the central monitoring platform. It receives, normalizes, and filters alarms from various sources, transforming heterogeneous alarm data into a standardized format that reduces clutter while maintaining comprehensive facility monitoring coverage.
2Reliability
If duplicate and repetitive alarms are processed individually, then complete alarm history is maintained, but computational burden and data clutter increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system discards duplicate and repetitive alarms by identifying them through normalization and filtering processes, while recovering and preserving essential alarm information through consolidated representations. This approach maintains reliable alarm history for critical events while reducing computational burden by eliminating redundant data processing.
Solution Approach 2:
The communications bridge extracts and removes duplicate alarm instances from the alarm feed, keeping only unique alarm events. This extraction process maintains complete alarm history for meaningful events while reducing data clutter and computational requirements by eliminating redundant duplicate alarms.
3Adaptability or versatility
If alarms from different domain systems are processed with different data structures, then system-specific alarm characteristics are preserved, but processing efficiency and standardization decreases
Solution Approach 1:
The communications bridge applies parameter changes by normalizing alarm data structures from different domain systems into a unified format. This transformation maintains essential alarm characteristics needed for system-specific identification while standardizing parameters to improve processing efficiency and enable consistent handling across all alarm sources.
Data Source
AI summary
A method includes obtaining, at a communications bridge, a first alarm and a second alarm from a domain system serving a facility, assigning, by the communications bridge, an alarm expiry time to the first alarm, labeling, by the communications bridge, the second alarm as noise based on whether the second alarm has a generation time before the alarm expiry time assigned to the first alarm, and providing the first alarm, the second alarm, and the labeling from the communications bridge to a cloud computing system.