This application claims priority to French Patent Application No. 08 03319, entitled Automatic Method of Display Configuration-Reconfiguration for a Set of Viewing Devices, filed on Jun. 13, 2008.
1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is that of systems comprising command or control facilities possessing a considerable set of viewing devices having to display a large number of parameters according to precise configurations so that, for example, certain information vital for the operation or the safety of the system is always displayed in the most ergonomic possible manner.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The favoured application field is aeronautics. Specifically, the instrument panels of modern aircraft possess at one and the same time a large number of viewing screens that will be referred to subsequently in the text as either “VDUs” or else “displays” and a large number of different displays that will also be referred to as “formats” subsequently in the text.
Thus, the instrument panel of an Airbus A380 possesses eight main screens and about ten possible configurations per screen.
This invention can however be applied to other technical or industrial fields such as command or control rooms possessing considerable sets of viewing devices and requiring considerable reliability and safety levels.
In the case of an aircraft instrument panel, it must be easily possible to configure or reconfigure the formats displayed on the VDUs so as:
The term configuration is understood to mean a state of the instrument panel defining the formats displayed on each VDU and the term reconfiguration is understood to mean a change of state of the instrument panel related to an event.
It is of course possible to ensure the management of the configurations-reconfigurations of the formats through a double-entry configuration table. The first entry gives the events liable to give rise to a reconfiguration and the second entry gives the configuration adopted as a function of the event occurring. This solution is applicable as long as the number of elements of the table remains reasonable. This solution may become very unwieldy to create and sustain when the possible number of viewings and configurations increases. Now, most reconfigurations depend on logic rules which exhibit the advantage of making it possible to synthesize in a consistent manner a large number of possible cases that it is irksome to enumerate exhaustively in a configuration table. Thus, PCT patent application referenced WO 2007/042477 entitled: “Display configuration-reconfiguration method for a set of display devices” proposes to replace the realization of a configuration table by a method which, on the basis of these logic rules, generates the desired reconfiguration in an automatic manner. The principle of this algorithm is set forth in
This language makes it possible to describe the domain, the properties, the transition rules and the preferences in a synthetic manner. It possesses a formal syntax akin to a mathematical language.
The interpretation algorithm makes it possible to transform each transition rule into a list of elementary reconfigurations.
By way of example, the main rules are:
However, the method described exhibits a drawback. With the enlargement of the surface areas of VDUs, it is today possible to display several formats within one and the same VDU as indicated in
This case may not be handled simply with the algorithm for reconfigurations without adaptations. Specifically, the basic principle of this algorithm is that a place (a VDU for example) may, at a given instant, contain one and only one “token” (a format for example). Moreover, this solution does not allow direct management of the finest level expected, that is to say the level of the particular arrangement of the “windows” in a “place”. Indeed, in practice, a VDU displays one or more windows, each of which can display a sub-format.
This point is not necessarily simple to handle. To manage the finest level of the reconfigurations, it is necessary either to resort to spreadsheet arrays of “Excel” type exhaustively detailing all the possible “window” layouts and all the possible format associations or else to specify state machines which also make it compulsory to list all the states. In all cases, with the increase in the complexity of instrument panels also referred to as the “Glass Cockpit”, these two ways of managing this new reconfiguration level are not optimal in terms of workload, maintenance and upgrade. It is in fact fairly well understood that if this “Windows” second reconfiguration level has a complexity, if only some hundred possible cases, the least upgrade having an impact on several cases, becomes extremely complex to manage. Moreover, with these two solutions, it is also necessary to manually develop the interface between the code generated automatically for the VDU/format reconfigurations and the Excel Formats/Windows/Layers files.
The basic principle of the method according to the invention is to modify the data model used by the algorithm which is only aware of the concepts of “place” and “token”so as to be able to manage a reconfiguration of N “tokens” in a “place” by performing N+1 reconfigurations of a “token” in a “place”. To define the value of the number “N”, it is necessary to introduce the concept of “layout” corresponding to the various ways of laying out the “windows” on a VDU. Each “layout” defines strictly N “windows” defined by their position, their size and their properties and will thus make it possible, in the guise of first reconfiguration level (VDU/Layout), to determine how many reconfigurations of second level (Window/Format) have to be performed.
The invention will be better understood and other advantages will become apparent on reading the nonlimiting description which follows and by virtue of the appended figures among which:
More precisely, the invention relates to a method of configuring and reconfiguring a plurality of displays referred to as “formats” on a set of viewing devices referred to as “VDUs”, reconfiguration of an initial configuration being induced by a cause referred to as an “event” so as to culminate in a final configuration, each configuration being obtained essentially by means of a reconfiguration logic language and of an interpretation algorithm, the said logic language comprising:
The new steps of the method according to the invention are illustrated in
In a second stage, the algorithm determines the configuration or the reconfiguration of the “layouts” of the “windows” on each “place”. Ultimately, the distribution of the formats on the VDU such as represented on the right part of
The simulation and the code generation rely on a basic process executed in a loop which, given an initial configuration and an event received, calculates the next configuration. It can take the form of a function which calculates the next configuration on the basis of a configuration and of an event.
The code generation involves a large number of possible solutions. For example, it is possible to write a generic reconfiguration function once and for all. The role of this function is to elect the elementary reconfiguration and to apply it. For this purpose, it uses the elementary reconfigurations generated either in the form of elementary data or arrays, or in the form of codes.
Number | Date | Country | Kind |
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08 03319 | Jun 2008 | FR | national |