Pipe Animations, Yes or No??

[JesperMP]

So the high performance standard says avoid certain colors, and limit animations.
It does not say, do not show any animations at all.
That is pretty much what I do. And regarding color blindness, I have dark grey for inactive and bright green for active. Flashing black/red for error. That can be seen by a color blind person. Green=good, red=bad is something I don't want to give up.

@I_Automation, the valve animation looks nice, but it is way too detailed.

 

[cardosocea]

I read this in 2015. Good Ideas for best practice.........ask the operator

If we held the operator as the foremost expert, we'd be using buttons, gauges and potmeters still. I'm always weary of giving operators too much say, particularly where they stick around for a year or so. Granted, change must be managed and training given, and when I mean training I mean before the system is put into place which is what companies fail to do repeatedly.

One question I always ask production operators is if they've ever checked for colour blindedness... and whenever I get push back, I like to screenshot a few SCADA pages and run them through the website below.

Coblis — Color Blindness Simulator – Colblindor

Really stark differences a lot of times.

 

[busarider29]

Pipe animations might be good, but I would only do them as a single fill color to represent process flow. That's it, nothing more. That color might be something like 'magenta' (?). Having several different colors to indicate different things is too much, plus it doesn't bode well at all for people that suffer from some degree of color blindness. For those people, you're not doing them any favors by using different colors to represent things, but especially using red and green.

 

[mburtis]

we'd be using buttons, gauges and potmeters still

If it wouldn't cost so much and decent ones where still available I would still be building panels with them.

 

[robertmee]

So the high performance standard says avoid certain colors, and limit animations.
It does not say, do not show any animations at all.
That is pretty much what I do. And regarding color blindness, I have dark grey for inactive and bright green for active. Flashing black/red for error. That can be seen by a color blind person. Green=good, red=bad is something I don't want to give up.

@I_Automation, the valve animation looks nice, but it is way too detailed.

That was my mantra for 20 years....red bad, green good. But studies have shown that can create eye strain over time. The ISA standard allows for red flashing indicators for critical alarms. But it's more the flashing that captures attention not the red. For your grey/green example, substitute white for green and you create a higher contrast, and there's no confusion between greens and red for those with color blindness.

I drug my feet because I liked what I had done for years, but after doing a few HP, it's grown on me. The muted pallette certainly is easier to look at, and it lends a more professional look to the overall product, IMO.

 

[JesperMP]

We only display the red color if there is a real alarm for a device. In normal operation there will be no red color.
For 'active' state I use a very bright green, so it is stands out. I don't see why a color creates 'eye strain' and white does not.
If the high performance standard says so, maybe I should change my ways.
My HMI's generally have a 'calm' feel to them.

I notice in both Boeing and Airbus coc kpits, lamps have all kinds of colors, and usually green for normal active state, not white. Maybe they haven't read the high performance standard.

edit: Had to edit c o c k p i t

 

[robertmee]

We only display the red color if there is a real alarm for a device. In normal operation there will be no red color.
For 'active' state I use a very bright green, so it is stands out. I don't see why a color creates 'eye strain' and white does not.
If the high performance standard says so, maybe I should change my ways.
My HMI's generally have a 'calm' feel to them.

I notice in both Boeing and Airbus coc kpits, lamps have all kinds of colors, and usually green for normal active state, not white. Maybe they haven't read the high performance standard.

edit: Had to edit c o c k p i t

Given the recent problems Boeing has had, I don't think I'd hold them up as a control standard

 

[TheWaterboy]

I built a set of screens once that displayed bubbles in the lines that moved according to the direction and velocity of flow in the pipelines. They would follow a circuitous route along the pipeline, looked similar to the old windows screensaver, and were pretty fun to watch.

It was very helpful especially as a teaching tool for new staff so they saw the results of their actions. In this 40 mile long system, pressures along with valves helped determine flow direction so you couldn't always predict what would happen even with flow modeling so a real-time display was needed.

 

[TPress]

Interesting discussion. As I went down the rabbit hole a bit deeper, I ran across a pretty good whitepaper from Rockwell that's written around the ISA standard....

https://literature.rockwellautomation.com/idc/groups/literature/documents/wp/proces-wp023_-en-p.pdf

 

[TheWaterboy]

It is. The High performance HMI has been the push for years now, but the marketing materials for HMIs only use that design in their cover page artwork some of the time and just as often both graphics options are shown because colorful pictures are what people often want. Form over function is a pretty common condition.

 

[Thomas_v2]

I once programmed a biogas plant on the site of an organic waste processing plant.
The existing plant had many conveyors to move the material from one stack to another. And they had moving arrows on the HMI to display in which direction the material flow was. For the biogas plant I was implementing, they wanted a similar HMI. So there were arrows on each pipe which were moving 1 pixel every 100 ms in the corresponding direction. They were made visible when the pump was running and the corresponding valves were open. This was done with Intouch HMI, and I have to say it was smooth running and loked really nice. Also Intouch made this really easy, as they were so intelligent, if you rotate a group by 90 degrees, they automatically switched the animation from e.g. vertical to horizontal.

I remember spending lots of time to do a fake seamless moving of the arrows, and let them disappear under pumps, containers, or "unvisible" rectangles with the same color as the background but a layer above.

This was the only time I've done this type of animation. But I have to say, it's easy to see from a distance on the screen what process is currently running.

What I always do is colored pipes, depending on the media flow. Here in Germany for waste water plants there's a quasi standard for colors. And the colors for the media are all muted, so that display errors or other relevant states with bright colors always get your attention.

 

[cardosocea]

I drug my feet because I liked what I had done for years, but after doing a few HP, it's grown on me. The muted pallette certainly is easier to look at, and it lends a more professional look to the overall product, IMO.

This is an interesting take... there's a pdf linked above where the following appears:

People are naturally proud of whatever they produce, whether it’s something as simple as a menu, or as potentially complicated as an HMI. It’s their baby and they love it, no matter what anyone else may think! Unfortunately, many people don’t know what they don’t know. As a result, they’re incapable of judging against established criteria; they’ve never been educated or trained on the subject at hand.

Which I admit, I've fell into before and was a valuable lesson to get feedback and realizing I was wrong. But in the end we're all human and it's been my battle with many other people that can't accept that what they did was wrong, even when people point out the limitations they had to work under and how that played a part in the quality of what they produced.

I don't see why a color creates 'eye strain' and white does not.

I notice in both Boeing and Airbus coc kpits, lamps have all kinds of colors, and usually green for normal active state, not white. Maybe they haven't read the high performance standard.

I think it depends on the green in question... a very pale green would be just as, if not more, acceptable as white. The issue is no one uses muted colours... with regards to the suitability of white, I agree that in some instances it is indeed unsuitable if the contrast to the background grey isn't strong enough (PlantPAX has this issue, for example). Reading PlantPAX icons from a certain angle on a screen is impossible because of the lack of contrast between white and that particular grey they use.

Aircraft is an interesting point you bring though. For starters it's the same device being controlled, whilst DCS and SCADAs control anything from river locks all teh way to nuclear power plants, that vairability means a lot more people got involved in the deveopment and specification. But more interestingly, you also don't see a P&ID of the hydraulic system of the aircraft with animated lines. Then I imagine there's an element of reliability, a lamp is still more reliable and easy to replace than a screen. And let's not get started on approvals and versioning/obsolescence.

This was the only time I've done this type of animation. But I have to say, it's easy to see from a distance on the screen what process is currently running.

This is a valid point... but with ever increasing automation, the days where the operator is manually doing everything with the SCADA overlooking temperature is not as common as it was. You still see animated pipes in control rooms... despite the operators only leaving the chair to make some coffee.

There's also the potential that you're looking at pipes in the wrong page you believe to be in...

 

[dummy_bit]

Pipe animations might be good, but I would only do them as a single fill color to represent process flow. That's it, nothing more. That color might be something like 'magenta' (?). Having several different colors to indicate different things is too much, plus it doesn't bode well at all for people that suffer from some degree of color blindness. For those people, you're not doing them any favors by using different colors to represent things, but especially using red and green.

Just throwing my own two cents in: I'm also all for changing the color of pipes (blue for used, gray for unused piping) so operators can easily see the path. In my case, it's pneumatic conveying of bulk solids from silo to sifter to silo to use bin. If there is an issue, the operator can just point at which diverter (which they have no clue where or what it is) is not completing the path and maintenance can easily go fix the issue without having to fiddle with the HMI to determine where it is. Most of the time the standard "DVxxx.xx" used on the HMI is not marked on or is worn off the equipment. Maintenance just knows it is the third diverter from the bin selected by the operator. Highlighted piping also visually verifies to the operator that they are drawing from the correct bin.

Animating the pipes on the other hand ends up being distracting to an operator on the plant floor who also performing other tasks. This is from when lean manufacturing gets too lean, but I digress.

In some mass produced building automation systems, it seems it is the opposite. Most people who check them (maintenance, facility managers) don't really care what it looks like. They just want it working. There's a whole bunch of fans and pumps and flow animations everywhere when in actuality, no one cares or checks them that often. Maintenance just wants to know where the fault is and go fix it.

 

[mburtis]

But more interestingly, you also don't see a P&ID of the hydraulic system of the aircraft with animated lines

This goes along with my mentality when it comes to HMIs. When you drive your car there isn't a little picture of the engine with pistons going up and down and a little tiny obscure text box that tells you the rpm. There is 5 or 6 large gauges that tell you what you need to know along with some lights and messages to tell you when something is wrong. Same thing with traditional airplane dashboards, a **** ton of dails and indicators, not a little picture of an airplane with spinning motors and pulsing pipes.

I work at a water treatment plant so I'll use an example from that. Take a tank level for instance. Just the level shown in a little textbox does me very little good. Unless I'm an experienced operator I don't know if that value is almost full, almost empty, or within range. Further more if the level is within range what I really need to know is if it is increasing, decreasing, or staying the same. That tells me if I need to increase or decrease production of the plant.

This is where the high performance hmi shines to me. Build the screens around trends and slider indicators that give the operator the true information about the process not just the raw data and then make them go to other screens to see trends and alarm limits.

I'm also a huge fan of the old school control walls for the same reasons, so maybe I'm just a weirdo.

 

[TheWaterboy]

When you drive your car there isn't a little picture of the engine with pistons going up and down and a little tiny obscure text box that tells you the rpm

Ahh but there is. especially in electric cars where you see which way the current is flowing - into the battery or the motors or both. Its intuitive at a glance.