Advanced Visualizations

Beyond the basic dashboard widgets, Rela AI includes three advanced visualization tools for situations that require a deeper spatial and temporal view of the plant's operation: a heatmap that shows equipment status overlaid on the plant floor plan, a cascading timeline that reveals correlated failure patterns across multiple assets, and sparklines that show trends in compact spaces across multiple widgets.

What is it for?

Standard charts and tables show numbers. Advanced visualizations show patterns — things that are nearly impossible to see in a table:

• Zone heatmap: Which areas of the plant have the most problems right now? Color-coded zones on the floor plan answer this question instantly, without searching through individual asset records
• Cascading timeline: When multiple pieces of equipment fail in the same week, were the failures independent or did one lead to another? A cascading timeline organized by asset reveals correlations that sequential tables cannot
• Sparklines: Is asset health improving or deteriorating across the fleet? A grid of mini-charts per asset makes this visible at a glance

Zone heatmap

How it works

The heatmap displays your plant floor plan with each zone colored based on a selected metric. The color scale goes from green (optimal) to red (critical). When you click a zone, it opens a detail panel with the assets in that zone, their current status, and any active alarms.

You can switch between different metrics (temperature, vibration, availability, alarm frequency) without redefining the zones — the zones remain the same, only the metric being visualized changes.

Set up the heatmap

1. Go to Dashboard > Edit > Heatmap.
2. Upload your plant floor plan image (SVG or PNG).
3. Use the polygon tool to draw each zone directly on the floor plan.
4. Assign a name and the assets contained in each zone.
5. Select the metric to visualize.

Interact with the heatmap

• Hover over a zone: shows the current metric value and zone name
• Click a zone: opens the detail panel with that zone's assets and active alarms
• Scroll: zoom in and out of the floor plan

Cascading timeline

How it works

The cascading timeline displays one row per asset (organized by zone or criticality) with a horizontal time axis. Events, alarms, and maintenance tasks appear as markers at the exact time they occurred. This makes it possible to see at a glance whether alarms on different assets happened at similar times — a pattern that suggests a common cause.

Marker types

Patterns the timeline highlights automatically

The timeline highlights patterns when:

• Multiple assets in the same zone generate alarms within a 2-hour window (likely a shared root cause)
• A single asset accumulates 3 or more alarms within 24 hours (accelerating deterioration)
• A corrective task is created within 1 hour of an alarm (evidence of proper response)

Sparklines

What they are

Sparklines are mini line charts embedded inside KPI cards, tables, and widget grids. They show the trend of a metric over a configurable number of data points without taking up much space.

The line color changes automatically based on the trend:

• Green: the metric is improving compared to the previous period
• Red: the metric is deteriorating
• Gray: no significant change (variation under 2%)

Sparkline grid

The Sparkline Grid widget shows one mini-chart per asset in a matrix format. To configure it, select which assets to include, which metric to show (health score, vibration, temperature, etc.), and how many data points to display.

This grid is particularly useful for fleet-wide health monitoring: at a glance, the red lines show which assets are deteriorating and need attention.

Key benefits

• Zone heatmap provides instant spatial awareness — which part of the plant is the most problematic
• Cascading timeline reveals temporal correlations that are invisible in individual charts
• Sparklines make fleet-wide trend monitoring possible in a compact space
• All three visualizations are interactive with direct navigation to asset and alarm details
• Heatmap supports multiple metrics without redefining zones

Common use cases

Scenario 1: Weekly zone review with heatmap Every Monday, the reliability engineer opens the zone heatmap with "alarm frequency" as the metric. The boiler room zone is red — it had 12 alarms last week while other zones had 2-3. They click the zone and see that 9 of the 12 alarms came from steam trap ST-07. They add an inspection task for that equipment.

Scenario 2: Root cause analysis with cascading timeline After a production line shutdown, the maintenance engineer opens the cascading timeline for the previous 8 hours. The timeline shows: at 10:15 AM, pump B-04 generated a temperature alarm. At 10:23 AM, pump B-05 followed. At 10:31 AM, the heat exchanger HE-02 (which is downstream of both pumps) generated a pressure alarm. The timeline makes the cascade visible immediately — both pumps were feeding the heat exchanger, and both failing simultaneously caused the downstream pressure problem.

Scenario 3: Fleet health monitoring with sparkline grid The maintenance coordinator has a Sparkline Grid widget showing the health score trend for all 20 critical assets over the last 14 days. On Monday morning, 3 sparklines are red (deteriorating). They click each one to open the asset detail and review the prognostics. Two are scheduled for maintenance next week — still on track. The third (motor M-11) has no scheduled maintenance but shows rapid decline. They create a preventive inspection task.