Room with a view

They are the brains behind a production plant, but the lack of the all-important ‘human factor’ in control rooms may be costing companies dearly.

Instead of minimising operator distractions from superfluous stimuli such as noise, light, and conversations, layers of ageing technology are doing the exact opposite, say experts.

Almost 100% of the time when I do an assessment, at the top of the list of things we come back with is that nobody owns this control room

ABB safety soncultant Tony Atkinson

Valentijn de Leeuw, vice president at the ARC Advisory research group, says technical planners have observed that plant operators tend to lose connection with the real world when dealing with the abstract symbols and tags shown on human-machine interface (HMI).

“The result is they do not understand the consequences of their actions on the process as clearly,” he says.

“An effective HMI reminds the operator as much as possible of the real process, and avoids the need to translate their thinking into code, numbers and tags.”

However, implementing a brand new control room system in isolation is unlikely to solve the problem, he says.

“The insight and expertise of people in design, implementation and use, remains essential,” he says.

Tony Atkinson, principal safety consultant at ABB consulting, is often called in to advise on the early stages of control room design.

“We ask about the tasks that will take place in the control room,” he says.

“A room focused on shipping communications would be very different to a typical chemical plant control room, which tends to be quiet, with lots of decision-making taking place.

“This encourages you to think about the whole control room, and also asks fundamental questions such as whether the room should be blast proof, or a clean area.”

Atkinson says fundamental errors in design can result from not spending enough time planning.

“I was in a control room where everyone needed to have full overalls and breathing apparatus when on the plant, but they had not designed a place to put it, so it was sitting all over the floor.”

He says the trend of retrofitting old control rooms with layers of new technology can also be counterproductive.

“A lot of plants are coming to the point where they have had two or more control systems in the same room and now require significant attention,” he says.

He also sees a lot of ageing technology onsite that is no longer fit for purpose.

“We all got hypnotised by fancy technology when screens came in during the eighties,” says Atkinson.

“We made some really bad engineering judgments as an industry about the presentation of data that didn’t actually fit the way people really think.

“So I spent first half of my career putting all this wonderful technology in and now I’m taking all of it out again.”

He says many companies are now waking up to the fact that they need to abandon the retrofit approach and start their control-room design from scratch.

But the issue still comes back to who takes ownership of the control room as a whole, he adds.

“Almost 100% of the time when I do an assessment, at the top of the list of things we come back with is that nobody owns this control room. So they end up being a succession of individual little projects that all make sense on their own, but have created a complete mess.”

One of the many things that are overlooked in control room systems is ergonomics, says Martyn Williams, managing director of COPA-DATA UK.

“Ergonomic design doesn’t just increase productivity. It simplifies work, reduces stress and encourages more rapid and improved decision-making, as well as healthier and more committed employees.”

The company supplies a range of industry-specific ergonomic HMI process solutions under its ‘Zenon’ brand to enable visualisation and control from the operator terminal through to plant-wide control.

“In every HMI we emphasise the `human’ part,” says Williams. “That means the actual user, as well as the project engineer and the employer.”

When people talk about operator effectiveness, it can mean so many different things, says Per Lundmark, a senior expert in operator effectiveness for control-room design firm, CGM.

“We focus on how to adjust things like the operator desk, monitors, lighting, sound levels, and look at ways to minimise disturbances between operators,” says Lundmark.

“From a technical point of view, we also try to avoid having a lot of different keyboards on the desk, which is a typical problem.”

Operator health is also vital to safety and staff welfare, says Lundmark.

He predicts that condition-monitoring sensors will eventually be extended to human operators to keep track of heartbeat and more sophisticated biological data.

“These could see in advance if someone is about to get sick, and advise them to go home and rest instead of running a hazardous plant,” he says.

“And when operators who have been static feel the need to get re-energised in some way, they should have a place to go for relaxation or entertainment.”

The next generation of control room operators will have grown up with touch-controlled mobile and gaming devices and future control room systems and design will also have to take this into account, he says.

Grant Le Sueur, the senior director of Control and Safety Software at Schneider Electric, believes that control room user interface trends will follow a similar pattern to what we see at home in our daily lives today.

“Market acceptance is growing at a tremendous pace around virtualisation technologies, which are a form of cloud-based computing, making them the next logical progression for the industry,” says Le Sueur.

Honeywell Process Solutions recently launched its Experion Orion Console, which it describes as an advanced display technology for the increasingly mobile plant operator.

It says the console, which builds on its Experion Process Knowledge System (PKS) control platform, features an improved ergonomic design and better displays to simplify control system management, reduce operator fatigue and improve situational awareness.

“The state of plant control today is like putting operators on a sleepless, 12-hour flight in economy-class seating and then asking them to make a critical decision that impacts their company’s production and employee safety,” says Jason Urso, chief technology officer at Honeywell Process Solutions.

“Operators need more than just process data to make a decision like that. They need an environment that helps keep them alert, allows them to move about more freely, and presents information more intuitively.”

The console’s features include an ultra-high definition overview and detailed, touchscreen displays that provide status assessments of process operations in a single glance.

When paired with wireless-enabled mobile technologies, the system also allows operators to view the same displays on hand-held devices in other areas of the plant.

Emerson Process Management has also recently rolled out its Integrated Operations - or iOPs - control room technology, which allows plants in remote locations to be controlled remotely through technology such as video conferencing.

“The remote operations and control room concept been really been pushed by safety and cost, especially in the offshore industry, because it costs a significant amount to have people in those locations,” says Jose Jimenez, the director of oil and gas Solutions at Emerson Process Management.

Added to this is the fact that fewer people want to work in far away locations on four-week rotations, he adds.

“This collaborative technology can bridge remote operations with production centres,” says Jimenez.

“You don’t have to be in one room to collaborate and look at the same set of data. We can bring all these people together to collaborate on a real time basis not just on problems but also on real-time opportunities.”