Control Views

Home

Control News

Control Questions

Science Articles

Technology and Policy

About Us

Control Forum

ISA announced the formation of a new standards development committee on human-machine interface, or HMI. The committee is seeking input and participation as it formulates a scope and plan of action. In keeping with its long history of developing integral standards, ISA established ISA-SP101 based on input from users across industry that HMI guidelines and standards would provide multiple benefits, including:

• Reducing operator mistakes and misinterpretations via clear and intuitive representations of conditions and operator control interfaces.
• Reducing learning curves for new operators, and allowing operators to move from one system to another (often within the same plant) with minimal retraining.
• Assisting communications and reducing errors between geographically dispersed groups.
• Reducing costs of re-invention.
• Reducing rework because differences in design philosophies could be solved up front.
• Enabling applications to be developed using HMI features that will be supported in future systems and HMI upgrades.

The overall scope of the HMI standards project is intended to cover all sectors of process and discrete manufacturing.

"Great care must be used in developing HMI standards to avoid being industry specific," cautions Douglas Peck, P.E., Project Engineer with Middough Consulting Inc., who has volunteered to serve on ISA-SP101. "You do not want to develop a standard that is embraced by the process industries, for example, but totally rejected by the manufacturing industries."

Craig Resnick of the ARC Advisory Group commented, "ARCwelcomes the formation of a non-industry specific standards development committee for HMI that will focus on topics such as how conditions should be represented and displayed for operator control interfaces, reducing learning curves for new operators, lowering the costs of re-invention and rework, and easing the pain of revision updates and upgrades for users."

Initial ideas regarding the specifics of ISA-SP101's work include menu hierarchies, screen navigation conventions, graphics and color standards, dynamic elements, alarming conventions, security methods and electronic signature attributes, interfaces with background programming and historical databases, popup conventions, help screens and methods used to work with alarms, and program object interfaces. Configuration interfaces to databases, servers, OLE servers, and networks could also be included.

ISA, which is the major standards setting organization for industrial process control and automation, published a standard, Graphic Symbols for Process Displays, which guided DCS manufacturers and users with standard symbols for pumps, valves, and other process equipment when the switch from panelboard to CRT based controls took place in the 1980’s.

Individuals wishing to participate or provide input are asked to contact Charley Robinson, ISA Standards, crobinson@isa.org or 919-990-9213.

This story includes information from an ISA press release and from the ARC Advisory Group.