Back to the Future - Process Visualisation
Way back when a control room consisted of row upon row of ink-and-pen chart recorders and dials on panels in the walls. An experienced operator just needed to stand in the middle of the room and spin through 360 degrees to get a feel for what was happening (they did this subconciously all the time). Then came the DCS!
DCS screens reduced the amount of information visible to an operator dramatically. The standard displays showed numbers with no context. Trend displays, with their infinite configurability and scaling changes, never allow an operator to get used to a specific pattern or amplitude. With the DCS we generally overwhelm the operators with data, but give them very little information - information being data in context.
The old panels allowed an operator to intuitively understand what had happened in the past to get the process to its current state, which direction the process was moving in, whether other parts of the process were following or fighting etc. It is very hard to get at any of this information through a DCS.
New visualisation and graphical techniques mean that we should be able to turn the clock back and start giving operators contextualised, actionable information rather than a flood of data. But what information do they require? Is it useful to be able to see mass and energy flow imbalances through a piece of equipment? Would displays of heat flux and heat transfer coefficient be more meaningful to an operator than a heap of flow and temperature measurements around a heat exchanger? Would tracking the quantity of an individual component in a distillation tower over time help an operator to manage separation in the column?
I would love to know if anybody has had any success in trying to provide better contextualised, actionable information to operators in real time. What type of information is most useful, and what visualisation techniques have you found to be successful?
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The title of this blog is
The title of this blog is very interesting and effective. There is movie on this name. I like your work.
I find the most frustrating issue for me is tha the DCs supplier software has not caught up with the need for displaying information and are probably caught up with fear of patent or other IP infringement... This means that as a user we need to create novel display techniques geenrally on our own and the toolset that is provided sometimes is not up to the task.
miami web design
Visualization can be done but is still limited
We have been able to successfully implement several advanced visualization techniques in different DCS systems. Yes it does take custom code because this is not out of the box widgets for any DCS vendor. Perhaps if more people asked for it?
The temperature profile with historical data, 30 minutes, back etc. is relatively easy to do. The visualization graphic to show mass or energy balance is not difficult, its getting the correct data that you can trust. So far this has been the limiting factor. We dont want to give the operator misleading information.
Lack of proper instrumentation is another issue we have that often prevents us from presenting information in a form that
would be more useful.
I would suggest checking out these links.
http://www.aidl.uwaterloo.ca/
http://cel.mie.utoronto.ca/
Lisa Garrison
More visualization ideas.
A 2008 article I wrote for Control magazien, titled "Fitting the Workplace to the Worker" included input from Lisa Garrison @ Acuite - a company that designs advanced process graphics. http://www.acuite.com/
I included one of Acuite's visualization techniques in the article but Lisa shared a whole lot more examples.
Another person mentioned in the article is Ian Nimmo, founder of User Centered Design Services http://mycontrolroom.com Ian's company also does some graphic design work as part of their control room design services.
Click to read the article http://www.controlglobal.com/articles/2008/276.html?page=full
Best wishes,
Dave
Previously the operators had
Previously the operators had to be constantly watching all the data points and then in their mind convert this into usable information. Based on that they then had to remember what had happened in the past to predict where the furnace composition was heading.
We (Vendor) implemented a historical ternary graph for composition tracking primarily for furnaces with exactly this problem in mind.
Going back to the original question about DCS vendors not necessarily providing the latest in data visualization. Could I ask what is better the vendor building a very flexible platform to allow the end user or integrator to develop graphics and visualization systems to meet their requirements or a graphic set that implements very advanced visualization systems but might not ever quite meet everyones requirements?
Flexible is just fine, but
Flexible is just fine, but the HMI needs to be able to handle the logic and number of datapoints required to visualize these things in the proper way.
Operators are full of great visualization ideas
Hey Chris,
I have had really good success with temperature profiles made up of horizontal bars. We have also found that by auto-populating a trend that is fixed in 1 location on the screen every time the Operator selects an object, the Operator maintains decent situational awareness. For controllers the Operator will see the SP, PV, OP, and MODE for instance.
The HMI handbook that PAS and UCDS put out recently has some very interesting ideas in it for displaying information vs. just data. I'd recommend that book if you haven't read it yet.
I find the most frustrating issue for me is tha the DCs supplier software has not caught up with the need for displaying information and are probably caught up with fear of patent or other IP infringement... This means that as a user we need to create novel display techniques geenrally on our own and the toolset that is provided sometimes is not up to the task.
For instance, it would be great to have a visualization that portrayed a temperature profile, history for each of those tags represented perhaps by 2-3 lines running vertically through the stack of horizontal bars showing snapshots of the profile perhaps 5, 10, and 30 min in the past, and alarm limits - all in the same object... without overtaxing the display or DCS.
Now if I only knew of a DCS that could do that without pretty intensive custom coding on the part of the user!