Situational Awareness Library with Symbol Wizards - a closer look

The Situational Awareness Library with Symbol Wizards  that is build in the InTouch 2014, makes it easy for application developers to create highly intuitive visual content and custom applications specific to an event. Situational Awareness Library of Symbols fully leverages the new Alarm Borders, Element Styles, Symbol Wizards, and the Animations described below. In addition, the Symbols can be customized to meet any customer specific needs or standards. For example, use a library Symbol to immediately accomplish 80% of what you need, then customize the remaining 20%, saving engineering time and capitalizing on Invensys™ symbol design best practices.

 In this post we will take a closer look at a number of symbols.

One of the new advanced Wizards is the Polar Star which shows a set of related process values on ‘spokes’ that form a visual polygon. As values change along the length of the spokes, the changing shape of the polar star’s polygon is easily recognizable by operators who can react quickly to abnormal process conditions. Each spoke contains a set of custom properties to set value set points, alarm limits, and coordinate set point locations for the normalized process value. When a process value changes from its set point location on a spoke, the animation changes the shape of the polar star polygon.   

Alarms: Alarms Annunciations are ‘Triple Coded’ to convey critical information in three ways: Color, Shape, and Text. This ensures unambiguous interpretation of alarms for faster operator reaction time and fewer mistakes. Color coded Alarm border animations around graphics clearly indicate the level of alarm state to help operators quickly identify abnormal situations and take corrective action in the proper order of priority. Alarm border animations can be configured to blink, remain solid, or change based on UnAcked, Acked, or return to normal situations. Severity Levels indicated by unique shape, color, and level number are displayed directly next to a Symbol for quick, clear, concise information contextualization. These animation capabilities are delivered fully configured and fully functional and require no scripting.

Trend Pen: Trend Pen is a new animated graphic element that enables an operator  to immediately identify not only a current data value but also the recent data historical trend in a specific absolute fixed time range (e.g. 8am to 5pm) or in a moving window time range (e.g. last hour), enabling an operator to instantly distinguish recent activity and dramatically improve predictability of potential future events and handling ‘potential’ issues before they become full alarms or events. An operator can return to their screen and see a quick historical trend of what happened while they were away.”

Source: Datasheet “InTouch 2014 — What’s New in the World’s #1 HMI” 

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