According
to a recent article in “Automation World”, when you consider situational
awareness, HMI screens are ground zero for the concept. That’s why
there’s been so much focus recently on the HMI color guidelines presented in
the High-Performance HMI Handbook and the ASM Consortium guidelines.
“But
there are inconsistencies between the color standards listed in those two
sources,” says John Krajewski, Director of Product Marketing at Invensys.
Invensys is not looking to dictate that one or the other of these paths is right or wrong; we’re looking to allow the user to implement the practices that best fit their business.”
To
deliver this, Invensys has “abstracted color out of our system platform to
allow users to choose the color palette that fits their operation best,” says
Krajewski.
In
the new InTouch software, Style Libraries are offered that allow the user to
choose color palettes that conform to the ASM Consortium guidelines or to the
High-Performance HMI recommendations. These style definitions can also be
altered to fit a company’s unique requirements. “This level of selection is
critical since we serve nearly every industrial vertical,” Krajewski notes.
“Initial
testing indicates that use of these new style definitions and standardized
colors can help users reduce situation interpretation time by 40 percent and
can lead to a five-fold improvement in detecting abnormal situations before
they occur,” says Krajewski. “After initial detection, the new navigation
aspects of the software can improve the success rate for handling abnormal
situations by as much as 37 percent; and we’ve seen a 41 percent reduction in
the time required to complete tasks.”
Updates
to the Historian software are another key aspect of the overall System Platform
update. The new Historian supports up to 2 million data points in a single
instance of the historian. To put that in perspective, the 2012 revision
(released two years ago) supported 150,000 data points; the 2012 r2 version
(released last year) supported 500,000 data points. “Plus, with the new
Historian, you can tier multiple Historians together to give you a nearly
limitless Historian platform,” adds Krajewski.
The
ability to access and store this many data points also impacts visualization.
After all, having the ability to log so many data points is one thing.
Accessing them and, more importantly, understanding them in the correct context
and extracting meaningful information from them is another. This is where
Invensys’s holistic investment in the System Platform comes into play.
For
example, consider the new alarm aggregation capability, which segments alarms
into four categories: Critical, High, Medium, and Low. “This grouping is based
on best practices from EEMUA and ISA 18.2,” says Krajewski, as he notes that
default settings for these categories are as follows:
- Critical alarms are those that need to be responded to in less than 5 minutes;
- High alarms need response within 30 minutes;
- Medium alarms in less than 60 minutes; and
- Low alarms are those that require a response in less than 120 minutes.
“These times can be adjusted based on the needs of the business,” he adds.
Extending
the notion of combining style and content for visualization are the new Symbol
Wizards, which allow users to simply point-and-click to assemble HMIs.
“Considering that many of those tasked with creating HMIs lack the depth of
experience of a 15 or 20 year engineering veteran, Symbol Wizards make it easy
for less-experienced personnel to leverage the experience embedded in the
software to create best practice HMIs,” Krajewski says.
Krajewski
explains that, using the Symbol Wizards, customers are walked through the
process of adding, say, a pressure transmitter to the HMI. “The Wizard eases
the development of presentation layer of the transmitter by asking the user
about the transmitter’s high and low limits, averages, etc.,” he says. “Once
those questions are answered, the symbol is created using best practices. With
the Software Wizards, HMI creation is driven by domain-oriented knowledge, not
software expertise. The Wizards allows users to focus on their capabilities
without being software experts. Being software experts is our job.”
Read
the full article at: http://www.automationworld.com/control/invensys-kicks-its-software-revolution#sthash.C77UWArM.dpuf
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