Usability

Yesterday, I saw two tweets (here and here) from the ARC Advisory Group, from their ARC_Advisory twitter account. These tweets shared news of YouTube interview postings with Emerson Process Management's Chief Strategic Officer, Peter Zornio. In part 1 and part 2 of the interview, ARC's Larry O'Brien asked Peter about Human Centered Design (HCD) and how it is being applied in product development.

I sent a note to Larry this morning asking if it would be OK to embed the videos in this post and he gave me the green light. I'll highlight a few of Peter's comment from both parts of the video.

In part 1, Peter describes HCD as a method to look at the user and the tasks this user performs. The goal is to design products to simplify, reduce, and eliminate steps in these tasks. Process automation suppliers have introduced lots of great technologies, but many of these technologies are coming faster than process automation professionals can understand, use, and from which receive value. The demographics of automation and operations personnel are also causing a "brain drain", which exacerbates the situation.

Peter highlighted three key reasons for apply an HCD approach to product development to help these technologies deliver the benefits they are capable of delivering. The first is increased usability, ease of use, and less training required to take advantage of the technology. The second is the ability to embed knowledge and work practices to help less experienced process manufacturing personnel become proficient. The third is to seek out and deliver a reduction or elimination of work processes.

Peter described this HCD process beginning 5 years ago with a partnership with Carnegie Mellon University, a leader in design. This joint collaboration led to the development of a central Emerson Process Management group to work with all of the division's product development groups to instill HCD design practices.

Peter shared one example of the results of this design process, Electronic Marshalling in the latest DeltaV system release. He noted that wiring practices for conventional I/O has not really changed in the 35 years since the distributed control system (DCS) was introduced. The process of stringing "home run" cables from the process areas back to marshalling panel and then connecting the wires from the marshalling panels over to the DCS I/O cabinets has been largely unchanged. Incremental improvements on I/O density and terminal blocks have occurred, but not a look at the overall process for ways to reduce or eliminate work.

The HCD approach required stepping back, looking at what project teams are trying to achieve, and looking at ways to streamline the tasks. Electronic Marshalling combined the two practices around marshalling and I/O wire connections into a single, flexible process. As the wires are landed from the process areas, they can be characterized on a channel-by-channel basis and electronically connected with the appropriate controller. This flexible approach also means inevitable late project changes can be quickly accommodated without rewiring.

This HCD approach has been institutionalized into a Human Centered Design Institute for product development efforts across the Emerson Process Management brands.

Let's close the week with a peek at a new whitepaper from Emerson's DeltaV team, Emerson Process Management's Human Centered Design Philosophy: Conquering Complexity. The team is led by DeltaV brand manager, Rune Reppenhagen. The intent of this human-centered design (HCD) focus is to eliminate unnecessary work, to reduce the applied technology's complexity, and to embed knowledge into the technology.

The advancement of technology has made advanced predictive diagnostics possible in process manufacturing facilities. The challenge is to focus this wealth of information into actionable insights for the plant operators, engineers, and maintenance staff. The whitepaper shares several examples of how products were redesigned with the three HCD tenants in mind.

AMS Device Manager has added Profibus DP device configuration and diagnostics capabilities. Work steps were eliminated to get these diagnostics into control systems like the DeltaV system. Profibus drives & motor starters and their associated diagnostics are part of the system and can be incorporated into control strategies, alarm strategies, and historical data collection. The past practice has been to hardwire or use serial connections to connect these devices. Engineering was then required to map the data into landing areas in the control system. This hurdle meant this integration was often not done. Through the HCD process, the steps were analyzed and ways to reduce the complexity incorporated.

Another example shared in the whitepaper is integrated machinery protection. Most plant turbomachinery and other rotating equipment often give advanced warning when problems develop. These warnings occur through changes in vibration levels and frequencies. Even if the machinery is instrumented with vibration and other monitoring sensors, the engineering challenge has been to bring this information into the control system to provide operators and maintenance personnel these early warning signs. By taking an HCD approach, the AMS Machinery Manager and DeltaV technologists mapped the existing process to integrate information between the DeltaV system, AMS Machinery Manager software and CSI 6500 Machinery Health Monitor systems.

Existing methods required more than 30 setup and configuration steps for each signal for an operator to see. Multiplying by the number of signals and the number of pieces of equipment it was apparent what a difficult task this was. The complexity was reduced by having the AMS Machinery Manager scan the CSI 6500 for what was available. An engineer then selects the appropriate parameters and alarms for the operator to be able to see and with which to interact. This file is then imported into the DeltaV system where the control modules and function blocks are created.

There are more examples including turbomachinery diagnostics via AMS Asset Portal powered by Meridium, DeltaV S-series hardware and I/O on Demand, and more. The common thread with all these developments was an analysis of current practices with an eye to eliminate unnecessary steps, reduce existing complexity, and embed the expertise of specialists into something that can be easily used--without requiring a mountain of engineering to climb over.

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The big news today is the unveiling of the $30 million Emerson Innovation Center to advance Fisher technology in Marshalltown, Iowa. From the release:

The world's appetite for energy is driving the development of next-generation nuclear plants, mega-train liquefied natural gas (LNG) plants, and large oil and gas refineries, which require larger capacities and highly engineered control valves and instrumentation. The 136,000-square-foot Emerson Innovation Center is designed to help companies deliver record volumes of natural gas and other forms of energy and consume less in the process, reducing costs and making plants run quieter and with reduced greenhouse emissions.

The center is home to the world's largest "flow lab" that, for the first time, enables large valves to be tested in real-world plant conditions to ensure production reliability, efficiency, environmental compliance, and safety before being installed at a customer site.

I'm not at the big event, but I've been following the action closely in Twitter and on blogs such as Gary Mintchell's Feed Forward blog and Eoin Ó Riain's Read-out Instrumentation Signpost blog.

Sound Off! Editors' Blog's Walt Boyes is sharing real-time photos of the lab using his TweetPhoto and Facebook accounts. You can see pictures of a noise testing assembly, acoustic lab-noise reduction technologies, and a Westinghouse safety cooling valve on test as well as some of the event's presenters. These pictures help bring to life what those of us not there, can see.

Just to give you a flavor for some of the news being shared in Twitter:

garymintchell: Emerson lab also used for testing to develop products with lower noise emission for quieter plants.

kyleyleger: Smalltown pride, company pride & individual pride & ownership is the strong foundation of our business. -Buzbee #EMR

garymintchell: Ed Monser Emerson Corp COO - it's a big deal for me for this investment to be here. Finest collection of valve engineers on planet.

waltboyes: Friction test uses new human centered design http://tweetphoto.com/21998256

kyleyleger: Grand opening includes 7 demonstrations of never been done before Fisher technology. Demos presented by industry leading experts. #EMR

Having events like these unfold in real-time through the social media channels provides those not in attendance with a way to follow the action.

We're starting the planning process for this year's Emerson Exchange event Sep 27 through Oct 1 in San Antonio to add social media components for the benefit of both those who can attend and those who can't join us in person.

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Update: Gary Mintchell adds more this morning on yesterday's event in today's post, Emerson's Innovation Center Opening.

It's been a while since I've shared an update from Emerson's Lee Neitzel on the OPC Xi standard. If you're not familiar with this new addition to the OPC Foundation's family of communications standards, here are three prior posts that give an overview of this Microsoft .Net-based standard:

• Secure, Firewall Friendly Communications
• OPC Xi Builds on Process Manufacturing Communication Standards
• OPC Express Interface (OPC Xi) Technical Overview Slidecast

The OPC Foundation website describes OPC Xi as:

...the result of collaboration among several OPC vendor companies from the process industry to develop an easily integrated and secure solution for a variety of plant communications. OPC Xi's primary objective was to provide a .NET-based migration path from OPC Classic. Additionally, OPC Xi may be used as a standard .NET WCF [Window Communication Foundation] interface for newly developed OPC servers.

A lot has changed over the 14 years the OPC standards have been helping process manufacturers connect applications together in a standards-based way. Cyber-security has grown in importance, as have the network technologies such as firewalls. OPC Xi updates the original Microsoft COM technologies to .Net to take advantage of the security, authentication, and other security/performance improvements.

The latest news from the OPC Foundation is that Lee and fellow OPC Xi developers are starting the Xi Implementation and Demo project. This project is open to all OPC Members, that will be conducted using weekly teleconferences to review the Xi Reference Implementation code for clients and servers to show developers how to adapt the wrapper code to their servers, and how to use the client code to quickly integrate Xi into client applications. Automation suppliers participating in this project are expecting to test their products, first over the internet, and then at the OPC Interop, tentatively planned for May of this year.

Lee shared that the teleconferences will be recorded and made available to OPC members. Anyone wishing to attend or needing more information should contact Lee.

One upcoming event is a June 29^th OPC Foundation WebDemo (I hope to provide a link when it becomes available). It will highlight OPC Xi access to OPC Data Access (DA), Historical Data Access (HDA), and Alarms & Events (A&E) servers by 3-D client applications, Microsoft Silverlight applications, and handheld devices. Another event where OPC Xi will be presented is at Connectivity Week 2010 May 24-27, in Santa Clara, Ca.

One final note I wanted to share is that the OPC Xi code is available on the OPC Foundation website to members and non-members. If you are not a member, the set of documents include OPC Xi Specifications, OPC Xi Introduction, and a License Agreement. The source code, freely available to anyone, includes Source Code Projects containing the base projects (libraries) for an OPC Xi Server implementation.

Members receive an additional OPC Xi WCF Performance Comparisons document and additional source code including:

• Wrapper Projects: Source Code Projects containing reference "wrappers". These wrappers allow you to wrap an OPC Classic DA, A&E and/or HDA Server, enabling access from Xi Clients
• Client Projects: Source Code Projects containing the base projects (libraries) for an OPC Xi Client implementation
• Discovery Server Projects: Source Code Projects containing examples of Discovery servers for querying the availability of OPC Xi Servers during runtime
• Contracts and Constants: Source Code Projects containing core implementation of OPC Xi
• WCF Performance Testing of Xi: Source code Projects and Batch files for automated testing of OPC Xi Performance using various WCF bindings

If you're an automation engineer, you may want your IT developers to know about these developments and to participate if your organization has in-house applications currently running on OPC DA, OPC HDA, and/or OPC A&E.

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Update: Lee shared this news item, OPC Xi Implementation and Demo Project Launch, posted at the OPC Training Institute site. It includes a link (registration required) to an OPC Xi Overview whitepaper.

So asks one of the liveliest conversations going on the Process Automation Usability Project site. The thread begins with an observation by the Putman Media staff:

Many recent accidents have clearly identified the contribution of bad alarm management practices as a major contribution. Action has been taken by regulators, standards bodies and customer forums to provide good guidance on alarm improvement, targets have been set through organizations like EEMUA who have effectively raised the bar in all industrial sectors. However, many struggle still with alarm management, especially alarm floods, and will continue to, until they address their HMI issues.

The observation continues with points about incidents caused by loss of the big picture, data overload, missed information or alarms. It closes with:

What we have today does not work and has proven that it exposes us to unacceptable risk.

Currently the forum thread has ten responses. ARC Advisory Group's Larry O'Brien observes that with many migration projects a lot of energy is put into preserving the "old way" of doing things.

Emerson's Aaron Crews, whose expertise we featured several times on this blog, added:

I have done migrations where the exact layout and overcrowdedness of the graphics is preserved but the colors have moved towards the grayscale look. That just doesn't get it done.

I think that the operators should have a lot of input in what the new graphics look like, but I would start with how they operate the plant, which units go down together, which numbers they constantly watch, and what the common problems and complaints are and go from there. The results are well worth the investment, in my experience.

A responder to Aaron's comment echoed the importance of the operators in the process, but that the engineers need to share some of the capabilities that new technology brings to see beyond the current operating paradigm. And, each industry has its own performance criteria and this impacts what the most relevant information should be.

I shared a summary of some research performed by the Center for Operator Performance from an earlier post. Putman's Keith Larson shared a link to an excellent overview of HMI design article from a recent Control magazine.

The thread closes with operator feedback on grayscale-graphics and how function follows form:

If you want operators to optimize process performance, give them process performance information. If you want operators to optimize process economics, give them economic data.

For this single forum-based conversation, there were perspectives given by industry analysts, editors, project engineers, process automation professionals, researchers, etc.

If you have thoughts on aspects of process automation usability, join in and share your viewpoints.

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