Last blog, Top
5 trends that currently drive the need of the modern industrial HMI application, covered the trends pushing the limits of
operations teams, often resulting in interruptions and inefficiencies in the process
due to human error. This post summarizes the impact of human error in
Industrial Operations. According to a recent white paper, “Situational
Awareness: The Next Leap in Industrial Human Machine Interface Design, these “errors, or mistakes, account for 42% of abnormal
situations in industrial systems. These abnormal situations have a direct
correlation to economic losses and safety concerns.
Abnormal
situations in industrial processes directly result in economic loss due to a
total or partial loss of the system availability, a reduced efficiency of the
industrial process, or a reduced quality of the resulting product or service. Studies
indicate that loss of system availability costs industrial systems 3-8 percent
of capacity.
When summed up over the operational lifetime
of a system the losses experienced due to process inefficiencies are likely
much higher due to a reduced capacity or a reduction in the quality of product
or service produced. These inefficiencies can result in a great deal of
economic loss over the lifetime of a system. These losses can be prevented, and
if an approach to improve HMI design is not taken, it is highly likely that the
amount of loss will continue to increase. Far too often the business value of a
process is poorly understood by the operations teams and completely ignored in
the development
of
the HMI design.
Safety
Risk
In
many industrial processes there is significant potential for bodily injury or
loss of life. There are multiple factors to consider for the overall system
safety including, but not limited to, alarm management, control loop performance
and the HMI design. In this document we will limit the discussion to the HMI
aspects of safety while recognizing it is a much broader topic. In the
investigation of many industrial accidents the HMI design has been cited as a
contributing cause.One
of the most common ways that HMIs communicate potential safety issues is
through alarm notifications. However, in a recent survey of industrial systems
users, nearly 70 percent of respondents indicated that alarm overload impacts their
ability to properly operate the production process.3 The techniques for alarm
communication that are commonly employed in HMI design do a poor job of
facilitating an operator to quickly assess the severity of many alarms and decide
on the appropriate action. Without an improvement in how this critical
information is being communicated and processed, the overall safety of the
system is being compromised.
Business
Value Model
In
just about any industrial process there is a simple model than can be used to
describe the business value of the process as depicted in the Figure below.
While many processes vary in terms of the product or service they produce, just
about any process has raw material and energy inputs and product/service and
waste outputs. The key goal for the process itself is to maximize its
availability while minimizing the costs (raw materials, energy, and waste) and
maximizing the quality and quantity of the products and/or services provided by
the process. Unfortunately however, the HMIs that are used to operate most of
the industrial processes in the world were designed with the main purpose of achieving
or maintaining a certain operational state rather than optimizing the
performance of the business. In order to best drive the business value of these
systems the design of the system must take the business values into account.
The process needs to be analyzed to determine which decisions the operator
should be making in order to
drive the desired business value. Once the decisions that the operations team
should be making are known then the user interface should be designed in a
manner that facilitates those decisions and drives the operator to the desired
action.”
Source:
Krajewski, John (“Situational
Awareness The Next Leap in Industrial Human Machine Interface Design”
Which of these factors are you
experiencing in your facility? Let me know in the Comments section below
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