Formal Models for High Performance HMI Engineering

Abstract

AbstractEngineering of Human Machine Interfaces for supervisory control in process industries can be characterized as an information integration task. This is particularly true for configural displays that are the core element of high performance HMI. Design and parameterization of these display units requires a large amount of data, usually readily available in the process design databases but missing in the engineering systems for the automation systems. This class of displays also requires further information that is not yet made available in any database or is not formal enough to provide a base for model driven HMI engineering approaches. We therefore designed a formal model of a computer aided engineering system of human-machine-interaction in supervisory control in process industries and added it to a computer aided engineering system to overcome the restrictions of the approach presented in Urbas and Doherr (2011). The model now addresses the abstraction-decomposition space of ecological interfaces by a simple hierarchical HMI level model and a method to efficiently collect information from P&IDs. This allows for task specific assemblies of process data and provides basic means to integrate standard mimics and complex displays. However, because the information integration is the core feature of configural displays, the formal basis for model based HMI engineering needed to be enhanced substantially. This paper presents the resulting core model and a graph-based search algorithm. The algorithm makes it possible to parameterize a certain set of configural displays directly from engineering data.