Operator Consoles Optimization

Does anyone has any experience in designing operator consoles for a gas plant? How many operator consoles will be required for a process area of a gas plant (1 or more than 1)? Are there any standards or industry guidelines which can be of any help? From my understanding, number of operator consoles should depend upon the following factors:

1) Control Loop counts (~ 200 to 280 per operator)
2) In addition, type of equipment/Complexity of process may contribute to operator workload?
3) Then we have EEMU-191 guidelines which define the alarm threshold/hour/operator should not exceed to 12.

I am pretty there should be a standard guideline (s) to which can help designers to optimize the number of consoles for a specific process area within in gas plant. Would love to have an open discussion. Thanks in advance.

I found "The High Performance HMI handbook" to be quite useful for what I do, and they do cover several aspects of console design. Not specific to gas plants though

Thanks Saffa, for a quick reply. At the moment I am looking for any best practices or controlled guidelines that govern the number of consoles in a process area?

If this is a gas plant, I would say at least 2 and have them isolated from each other. I have never dealt with gas before, but if the main console system crashes, how do you monitor and control the plant safely? If there is an incident and the main console room is trashed, how will you monitor / control the plant to shut things down?
I may be way off base, but this is my opinion.

regards,
james

I have a little bit of experience. Smaller Gas Plants. 1000decks a day or less with 1 operator have 1-2 consoles. 10000deck a day+ will have more than 1 operator thus more than 1 console. As far as standards I don't know. that seems to be customer specific...

Oh and as James said they typically are on a Server setup with a backup console

Thanks James and Dwsoft for the inputs. Well typically Central Control Room (CCR) is the safest place of gas plants. Also, within the gas plants you have divided the consoles based on process areas or trains which are running parallel processes, such as gas treat 1, 2, 3 and utility areas.

We are adding a new liquid recovery train with various units in it. Approximately, 1100 to 1200 analog lnputs and around 250+ control loops. What would be the criteria to decide either 1 or more than 1 consoles are needed for the entire train? Would it be the number of control loops? Would it be the number of units under the train or would it be the number of alarms per operator?

I haven't personally verified the contents of this, but one could browse ISO 11064 for some ideas.

As a side note, your HMI licensing might limit the number of monitors you can have per console.