Rule based intelligent alarm management system for digital surveillance system

• US 20060208872A1
• Filed: 03/02/2005
• Published: 09/21/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 03/02/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Company Limited (Panasonic Holdings Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Company Limited (Panasonic Holdings Corporation)
• Inventors: Kikukawa, Jun, Yashio, Hitoshi, Joo, Namsoo, Yu, Mike
• Granted Patent: US 7,352,279 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 340/517
• CPC Class Codes: G08B 25/08 using communication transmission lines G08B13/19658, G08B21/0286, G08B25/016 take precedence
• CPC Class Codes: G08B 29/186 Fuzzy logic; neural networks

Abstract

An alarm management system includes an alarm receiver module receiving customized alarms from one or more of sensor devices and surveillance systems. A condition evaluation module performs an evaluation of one or more customized conditions for a customized alarm. An action handling module executes customized actions based on the evaluation.

Claims

1. An alarm management system, comprising:

an alarm receiver module receiving customized alarms from one or more of sensor devices and surveillance systems;

a condition evaluation module performing an evaluation of one or more customized conditions for a customized alarm; and

an action handling module executing customized actions based on the evaluation.

2. The system of claim 1, further comprising a user interface providing user capabilities to search, add, delete, and update instances of alarm definitions and conditions.

3. The system of claim 1, wherein said condition evaluation module includes a rule engine for processing alarms by evaluating customized rules to determine if one or more customized actions should be executed based on customized conditions associated with a customized rule.

4. The system of claim 3, wherein said condition evaluation module includes a filtering condition handler evaluating a customized filtering condition to determine whether an alarm should be ignored or else processed by said rule engine.

5. The system of claim 3, wherein said rule engine requests external systems to evaluate conditions specified by a rule.

6. The system of claim 1, further comprising a development interface allowing developers to extend said alarm management system by providing SDK and APIs to customize alarms, predicates, and actions and to save implementation files.

7. The system of claim 1, further comprising an alarm state management module managing lifecycles of alarms and keeping track of active alarms.

8. The system of claim 1, further comprising a system to read dynamic configuration information of a device that from an external database.

23. The system of claim 1, further comprising a user interface providing user capabilities to search, add, delete, and update instances of alarm definitions and conditions, thereby obtaining customized alarms, customized rules for conditionally initiating a customized sequence of actions based on an evaluation of a customized alarm, and customized filtering conditions for conditionally preventing a customized alarm from being evaluated by the customized rules.

9. An alarm management method, comprising:

receiving customized alarms from one or more of sensor devices and surveillance systems;

processing customized alarms by performing an evaluation of one or more customized conditions to determine if customized actions need to executed; and

executing customized actions based on the evaluation.

10. The method of claim 9, further comprising providing a user interface capable of being used to search, add, delete, and update instances of alarm definitions and conditions.

11. The method of claim 9, wherein performing the evaluation includes performing an evaluation of customized rules to determine if one or more customized actions associated with a customized rule should be executed based on customized conditions associated with a customized rule.

12. The method of claim 9, wherein performing the evaluation includes evaluating a customized filtering condition to determine whether an alarm should be ignored or else processed by performing the evaluation of the customized rules.

13. The method of claim 9, wherein performing the evaluation includes communicating a request to an external system to evaluate one or more conditions specified by a rule.

14. The method of claim 9, wherein performing the evaluation includes getting a condition and one or more predicates for each rule.

15. The method of claim 14, performing the evaluation includes getting a function name and description of arguments for each predicate.

16. The method of claim 15, wherein performing the evaluation includes:

(a) building the arguments;

(b) loading the function; and

(c) executing the function with the arguments, thereby performing the evaluation.

17. The method of claim 16, wherein building the arguments includes one or more of:

(i) assigning a value in the description to an argument;

(ii) assigning a reference of a customized alarm to an argument;

(iii) assigning a reference to a data structure of a set of all active alarms to the argument; and

(iv) assigning a reference to a data structure of a set of active alarms to the argument, said reference selected because of its assignment to another identifiable argument.

18. The method of claim 9, wherein executing the customized actions includes:

(a) building a collection of actions based on results of the evaluation; and

(b) sending the collection of actions to an action handling module adapted to execute the actions.

19. The method of claim 9, further comprising providing a development interface allowing developers to extend an alarm management system by providing SDK and APIs to customize alarms, predicates, and actions and to save implementation files.

20. The method of claim 9, further comprising managing lifecycles of alarms and keeping track of active alarms.

21. The method of claim 9, wherein performing the evaluation includes communicating a request to active alarms for correlation of event.

22. An alarm management system, comprising:

an alarm receiver module receiving alarms from one or more of sensor devices and surveillance systems;

a rule engine evaluating rules for processing alarms to determine if one or more actions should be executed based on conditions associated with a rule, including;

(a) getting a condition and one or more predicates for each rule;

(b) getting a function name and description of arguments for each predicate; and

(c) executing a function with described arguments, thereby evaluating the rule;

a filtering condition handler evaluating a filtering condition to determine whether an alarm should be ignored or else processed by said rule engine; and

an action handling module executing actions based on results of evaluation by said rule engine.