Electronic Flight Bag Filter System for Reducing Information Overload
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional electronic flight bags require users to sift through a large amount of non-relevant information to find specific, relevant data, which is time-consuming and burdensome for crew members operating aircraft.
Innovation Solution
An electronic flight bag system that allows users to filter information using criteria such as current display, geographical location, logical location, and operational status, presenting a focused subset of pertinent information via a display, accessible through icons, hyperlinks, or document listings.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Quantity of substance
If the electronic flight bag stores and displays a large number of aeronautical charts and flight-related documents, then the information availability is improved, but the time required to locate relevant information increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the large volume of flight information into multiple categories (aeronautical charts, flight documents, weather data, etc.) and further divides them into subsets based on relevance criteria. This segmentation allows the system to present only the necessary portion of information at any given time, reducing the time to locate relevant data while maintaining comprehensive information storage capability.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent extracts and presents only the relevant subset of information from the complete database based on user-defined criteria such as current flight phase, location, and operational parameters. By taking out only the necessary information for the current context, the system eliminates the need for crew members to search through unrelated data, directly addressing the time loss problem.
2Quantity of substance
If the electronic flight bag provides comprehensive flight information, then the information completeness is improved, but the complexity of information processing increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements preliminary action by automatically pre-filtering and organizing information according to flight phase, location, and operational status before presentation to the user. The system proactively prepares and displays only the relevant subset of comprehensive information, eliminating the need for manual sorting and reducing processing complexity while maintaining information completeness.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces an intermediary filtering mechanism that acts as a mediator between the comprehensive information database and the user interface. This intermediary layer processes the complete information set and selectively presents only relevant data based on multiple criteria, thereby maintaining information completeness while significantly reducing the complexity of information processing for the end user.
3Reliability
If multiple criteria are used to filter information, then the relevance of presented information is improved, but the device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges multiple filtering criteria (flight phase, geographical location, operational status, document type) into a unified filtering mechanism that operates simultaneously. By combining these criteria into an integrated system rather than separate sequential filters, the patent achieves high information relevance while minimizing the complexity increase that would result from multiple independent filtering systems.
Data Source
AI summary
A system and method for filtering information from an electronic flight bag system (EFB) used on a mobile platform, for example, on an aircraft. In one embodiment the system makes use of an EFB having a display with a selection to enable a filter. When the filter is enabled, the user is presented with a plurality of options for limiting retrieved information to only specific types of information or data. This allows one, two or more layers of filtering to be implemented on the information that is searched and obtained from the EFB, and enables a limited subset of information to be obtained that is available for viewing on a display associated with the EFB. The system and method eliminates or significantly reduces the amount of non-relevant information that the crew members are required to review when attempting to obtain specific types of information from the EFB.