Safety & Maintenance
Human-Centered Design Drives Latest Generation of High-Performance HMIs Focus on the operator creates more intuitive and effective process control and management for increased efficiency and safety
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or decades, operators in manufacturing facilities have relied on Human Machine Interfaces (HMI) for a visual overview of their process systems to monitor critical status and control information. A properly designed graphical user interface improves situational awareness, reduces workload, and enables the operator to view the entire process at-a-glance so they can focus on mitigating abnormal situations. At stake is more than just operations efficiency, but also product quality, manufacturing throughput, operations profitability and foremost, overall safety. Poor HMI designs have been identified as factors contributing to abnormal situations, lost production and even accidents. In response, today’s more advanced HMIs are designed to help people optimize operational performance, improve situational awareness, and recognize issues before alarms occur. These high-performance HMIs are helping operators make better, faster, and more informed decisions. “Issues with HMI design began when we first moved from physical switches and controls to a keyboard and mouse. The industry got excited that suddenly we could show a lot more information than we were able to before because everything was now digital,” said Michael Simmers, Lead Field Engineer at NovaTech Automation, a Pennsylvania-based provider of process control and optimization solutions, including the TotalVision graphics engine/HMI. “As a result, a lot of data landed on an operator’s screen just because it was possible. But too much information makes it hard for an operator to focus on the right information in real-time.” The user interface issues with early HMIs persisted for many years. Operators had to work with very dense displays and were often limited to a single monitor. Process drawing displays of the physical layout of a plant were difficult to read, and graphic user interfaces (GUI) typically used bright lines, text, and a myriad of bright colors on dark backgrounds that caused viewing fatigue.
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14 IMD DECEMBER 2021
