Part 1 of this series was published in BIC Magazine's December/January 2019 issue. It discussed the first common mistake in control room design: having no prior experience designing control rooms.
Mistake No. 2: Ignoring valid data from a group of stakeholders. Stakeholders typically include people from automation, building engineering, operations, electrical, IT, instrumentation, management, logistics and production, among others. Make sure to emphasize long-term maintenance, cleanliness and proximity to bathrooms, and include break rooms and an exercise area.
Solution No. 2: Resist the temptation to immediately jump into specific details and forget the big picture. A good way to solicit questions or guide the discussion is with facts found in documents like ISO 11064, Control Room Best Practices. Use a top-down approach that requires you to implement goals in normal, abnormal, emergency, outage and startup conditions. Don't forget your own "work practices."
Start by laying out the requirements for the worst-case scenario. In some refineries, that might be the oil movements console. There, you may find hooter horns, legacy systems, a new monitor array for the distributed control system, power supplies, hard-wired switch panels, radio and video conferencing equipment.
Another important point that is often overlooked is that people need their belongings. If you are going to significantly reduce personal storage, provide a locker room or a common storage area with lockable sections.
Technology is ever-changing, so incorporate flexibility in your design. You may move from a single row of display monitors to large integrated screens at the console or mounted on walls to provide multiple views and windows. Photo-realistic renderings or even a virtual reality tour during final design will enable everyone to see the new world you're creating. It could be the difference between a great control room and one that transfers bad habits and old problems.
Mistake No. 3: Not fully integrating the proper tools. Today, almost anything is possible anywhere in the world through visual collaboration and live content. Design your control room with that in mind. Too much natural lighting creates glare or washes out video. Control light sources, and use ambient lighting as often as possible. Ditch the "cave approach" and illuminate the control room to a level of 300-500 lux.
Solution No. 3: Design with live content in mind. Proper management of assets might mean fully integrated solutions, overview displays and collaborative control -- all visually integrated and using a single multifunctional keyboard and mouse.
Alarm management determines priorities so operators can deal with them faster and more efficiently. Overview displays can capture those desktop alarms using either audio and/or image. The operator decides what's important. Everything else resides in the background so only the important alarms come up.
As basic as it seems, one of the most important features in the control room is the chair. Every operator needs the right combination of comfort, support and performance to fit his or her particular body shape over time. Doing your due diligence on this one item will go a long way toward mitigating other concerns.
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