Interested in the Acuite Educational Session, "Human Factors in the Process Industry, Why Good Design Matters", presented at the 2013 Rockwell Automation Process Solutions Users Group? Download it here.
This is very well presented article on the topic of how new HMI technology can and is being used to improve process control/factory automation. Of course my favorite quote is, "the operator is less engaged and only as good as the information delivered to him".
Information visualization is what its all about but, you have to do it right. View full article
Do you ever feel you need a guideline to the guidelines? There are numerous books and guidelines available that talk about "good" Human Machine Interfaces but who has time to or want to ready them all? This is a short presentation the compares the major guidance sources for the process industry and attempts to clarify/explain some of the common recommendations. View Presentation
Over 10 years ago I attended one of my first Abnormal Situation Management (ASM) Consortium quarterly meetings. One of the heated topics discussed at this meeting was the "lights-out" scenario for future plants. Time has passed and we still have humans "in the loop". Recently, this topic once again is gaining attention and for some very good reasons. There have been significant improvements in remote monitoring that now enable companies to reduce human exposure to potentially hazardous environments. Risk reduction is certainly a direction we want to go but are there hidden problems?