Operator effectiveness and efficiency are optimised when the right information is presented via easily understood graphics.
By Mariana Dionisio, a senior product manager for Emerson
Today’s process manufacturing facilities operate in a landscape that is rapidly changing from that of just ten short years ago. Retirements have dramatically reduced the pool of experienced operators in the control room, while the growing need for efficiency, sustainability, and flexibility have led to increased workloads and more responsibility for leaner teams. With time and training, even the newest operators can gain the required experience, but in the meantime, plants need to empower their current operators to make smarter and faster decisions—regardless of experience level.
Fortunately, this experienced personnel shortage comes just as new digital software and technologies are creating a boundless automation future. More than ever before, automation technologies are being designed to collate data from multiple domains and present it as actionable information for better decision making.
Nowhere is this more important than in the control room, where improved situational awareness—delivered through intuitive, secure human machine interfaces (HMIs)—helps operations teams make the most of every person in the plant. Ultimately, the right HMI makes everyone more efficient and effective in their day-to-day tasks, improving safety and other facets of operations.
Avoiding complex customisation
For decades, plants have created highly customised graphics for their HMIs, attempting to integrate and present data from multiple applications, in the hopes of making their operators more effective. Consolidating all the data requested by operators into the HMI often resulted in overcrowded displays that decreased situational awareness and operator performance.
Furthermore, these convoluted graphics were frequently created using complex custom coding. Custom-scripted solutions introduce additional points of failure in the system and result in maintenance issues when the people who originally created them are no longer available. Moreover, making any changes to such a system is typically time-consuming and requires extensive expertise.
The most successful manufacturers today are moving away from this model, instead choosing HMI solutions designed for high performance operations and improved situational awareness, right out of the box. Advanced HMI software is built from the ground up with security, intuitive operation, and scalability top of mind. Moving to such a system will deliver improved performance today, and it will continue to deliver value across a facility’s lifecycle as operations change to meet a more mobile, connected future.
Choosing the right HMI
While there are many HMI software solutions available, the best solutions share several key characteristics designed to make them more effective from the moment they are installed. Best-in-class solutions offer features that make HMIs easy to create, navigate, and operate. By focusing on these three key areas, operations teams can more easily select an HMI solution that will deliver improved situational awareness and operator performance for every operator in the plant, regardless of expertise or personal preference.
Easier HMI creation
Today’s best in class HMI software makes it easy to collect and present data from a wide array of different sources such as web applications—including other HMIs such as those from programmable logic controllers—directly into distributed control system HMI graphics for one cohesive view into the process. In a few clicks, users can securely add permitted information from websites, applications such as advanced control and analytics, and other operations software directly into the primary HMI display.
This ability to easily and securely integrate disparate information sources into the HMI screen is extremely important because it empowers operators to access other relevant sources of information from the HMI display. This can be done without navigating to other windows or applications, which can distract the operator from focusing on the process. The best modern HMI packages also provide extensive out-of-the-box libraries for easy creation and maintenance of software components, such as faceplates and other graphical objects.
To accommodate the wide variety of system setups across plants, the best solutions should incorporate scalable vector graphics technologies to automatically adjust displays for best fit with different form factors. When teams choose this type of resolution independent HMI, displays automatically adjust to the new form factor when users change monitor sizes—without the need to redesign the display. Removing the HMI’s dependency on screen resolution saves significant engineering effort when control room computer monitors change sizes throughout the lifecycle of a plant’s operations.
A typical automation project can include hundreds of displays, with potentially thousands of different graphical objects. Over the lifecycle of an operation, graphics typically need to be adjusted, but today’s lean teams do not have the time to modify thousands of graphical objects individually. To solve this problem and improve engineering efficiency, modern HMI software incorporates class-based graphical objects. If a change is necessary, users simply update the class, and the changes for that class automatically propagate to every display where the object is used.
Easier HMI navigation
A core element of enhanced situational awareness is easy and intuitive HMI navigation, which ultimately helps operators make better and faster decisions. When an operator faces multiple stacked application windows, essential data quickly gets buried, and critical seconds are lost as the operator attempts to locate key information. Today’s best HMI solutions are built with simplicity and easy navigation in mind, empowering operators to quickly find the display or data they need.
Easy navigability starts with hierarchical displays. Modern HMI solutions provide varied navigation options out of the box, with each corresponding to configured display hierarchies. Display hierarchies organize operator graphics in a logical way so operators can quickly drill down as needed into the process. Alarm rollups on the display tabs of these hierarchies serve as clear visual indications so operators can quickly find the right display to respond to a critical alarm.
Best-in-class HMI solutions also provide customizable watch areas that allow operators to monitor key parameters easily and consistently, even while performing other control actions. In the most intuitive systems, operators can drag and drop critical data into the watch area on the fly to ensure it remains visible when navigating away to other displays.
Empower every operator
High performance operators use data effectively to make good decisions and quickly solve critical problems. As plant personnel continuously adopt technologies to provide data that gives a more holistic view of their operations, they need to properly consolidate and integrate this data into intuitive visualizations for operators to be successful. Making the most of this data begins with making critical information visible, understandable, and easily actionable – key competencies of modern HMIs.
All figures courtesy of Emerson
