At this year\’s PAS Technology Conference in Houston, I heard not one, but two, examples of technology application that I have not previously encountered. The first piece of insight came during Keith Dicharry\’s presentation. Dicharry is the process and automation leader at BASF\’s plant in Freeport, Texas. In his presentation, he described how BASF is building the \’control room of the future\‘ at this plant. They completed alarm rationalization a year ago, and are now in the process of implementing the Honeywell Experion overlay portion of the project. Another part of this \’control room of the future\‘ project involves piloting the development and use of high-performance HMIs. A key aspect of this pilot involves having interface screens designed by the engineers and operators who will actually work with the screens. This is what caught my attention most. I have not heard of a project where, as part of a new interface rollout, the op-erators got to play a significant role in designing the interface they\’ll work with. Just to be sure this was not a trend I had somehow missed, I asked several other end users, as well as a few other industry suppliers at the conference, if they had heard of something like this before. They all confirmed that this was news to them too. \“We reviewed the high-performance HMI philosophy, conducted a high-performance HMI workshop, and then devel-oped a style guide for operators and engineers,\“ Dicharry said, describing how BASF came about taking this new HMI development step. \“This was all part of additional training we\’re doing with op-erators to help them grasp the concepts and capabilities to better design HMI graphics.\“ Explaining the process a bit fur-ther, Dicharry said that, historically, operators haven\’t been aware of everything that the distributed control system (DCS) could do. They only know what they\’ve been taught about it. \“So now we\’re teaching them many different ways to look at the data and asking them how to best design their HMI based on what makes the most sense to them,\“ he said. Dicharry noted that more review of \’before and after graphics\‘-illustrating the difference between BASF\’s former multi-color HMIs and the newer, less colorful high-performance HMIs-is needed to help operators \’capture the essence of the scope of change we\’ve initiated with this project.\‘ One of the biggest findings of this project to date, according to Dicharry, is that \“when you get an operator to build his own interface, you don\’t have to train him on it.\“ Other interesting discoveries include learning that operators happen to like certain display aspects that some had thought they wouldn\’t. For example, Dicharry said that he doesn\’t like radar plots and figured most operators didn\’t either; but it turns out the operators love them and use them quite a bit in their HMIs. Though the operators did not initially like the new high-performance, less colorful screens of the new HMIs they were designing, they\’ve now changed their minds and are happier with the new design because \“they\’re getting better information and they\’re easier to read,\“ Dicharry said. It\’s also enabled them to design screens that \“allow them to do a quick scan to see how everything is operating.\“ As for that other interesting examples I encountered at the PAS Technology Conference…look for my upcoming Trend Watch article on cyber security dashboards.
David Greenfield is Director of Content for Automation World. He has been covering industrial technologies, ranging from software and hardware to embedded systems, for more than 20 years. Prior to joining Automation World in June 2011, David was Editorial Director of UBM Electronics\‘ Design News magazine, which covers system and product design engineering. He moved to UBM after serving as Editorial Director of Control Engineering at Reed Business Information (a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.), where he also worked on Manufacturing Business Technology as publisher, several years earlier. In addition, he has held editorial positions at Putman Media and Lionheart Publishing.
