Kristoffer Husoy

3D visualization of integrated process information

Industrial plants are complex and consist of a large number of components. Human operators are responsible for operating these processes. Operators use the interface daily and strongly depend on information from the system and the possibilities to execute control commands in the system. This interactive demonstration uses a 3D process model of the plant area as the user interface for control systems. This interface supports extended information integration and remote collaboration.

HawkEye: a novel process automation interface

Operators in the automation industries today have difficulties in maintaining their situation awareness and understanding the impact of events. Massive amounts of data must be perceived and made sense of in a short amount of time, and maintaining overview is difficult while digging deep into the details when solving problems. The HawkEye prototype described here seeks to overcome these problems by providing a zoomable interface with animated movement and information aggregation. The intentions are that the information layout with zooming can provide a better sense of context, the animated movement can support continuous learning and the information aggregation can help operators make sense of the events and their implications as they occur.

Applying usability engineering in ABB

This paper reports experiences from applying simple and flexible usability engineering methods to projects in a large multinational organization. The field of industrial control has traditionally been resistant to employing usability methods due to perceived complexity, difficulties in applying to the wide diversity of project types and low reward. In such an environment, it is difficult to perform thorough, state-of-the-art usability engineering methodologies, as the deadlines, requirements and demands of the development projects are too rigid. As an alternative, this paper presents how a simple and flexible usability engineering model that does not require much effort or cost has been applied to three fundamentally different projects and has proven to yield positive results.

CAN VISUALISATION IMPROVE REMOTE COLLABORATION

Abstract Collaboration is recognised as essential to achieve efficient and safe operation of industrial processes. This paper presents a comparison test of a P&ID-based schematic representation, a 2D map and a 3D visualisation for remote one-to-one collaborative tasks. The results indicate that the participants had a higher completion rate of tasks based on the 2D and 3D interfaces, and they experienced fewer communication errors. The main conclusion is that the choice of visualisation technique for the interface should strongly depend on the specific task. 3D and 2D interfaces afford to use spatial references more and more intuitively whereas the schematic interface supports the use of topological references better than the others.