Control rooms have come a long way over the years, and there remains ample room for improvement. Fortunately for operators, though, a significantly improved control room of the future might be closer to reality than they think.
Years ago, control rooms were dominated by large mimic panels covered with gauges and dials that provided a limited view and inflexible means of interacting with the process. Today, the modern control room includes sophisticated graphical user interfaces, and specialized furniture in purpose-designed spaces that make careful use of lighting and ventilation. The layout of the control room is arranged to accommodate the movement of people and to abate excessive noise. A control room may have a range of adjoining facilities, such as a kitchen and even gymnasium equipment, to help operators keep healthy and alert. Of course, not all control rooms are like this, but a state-of-the-art control room can provide operators with an environment that is, at least superficially, a pleasant and comfortable place to work.
Although these advances have certainly improved conditions, several important areas could be further improved. Today’s operator console, a key element of the control room, is effectively an isolated island from which operators can rarely escape. Operators have difficulty moving away from the console to take brief breaks or work with others in the control room without losing critical situation awareness. Display layouts tend to be inflexible, often hamstrung by having to display information across multiple small screens, making it difficult for operators to access necessary information. The operator is also confronted with a multitude of devices such as keyboards, mice, radios, and telephones, and it is difficult for operators to work efficiently when constantly switching between devices. Additionally, consoles are difficult to scale from single to multiple operators and are typically engineered to cope with the maximum number of operators required for startup, shutdown, and turnaround operations. On top of this, the console’s physical arrangement does not allow operators working 12-hour shifts to get and stay comfortable. The result is that life for operators might be compared to traveling in economy class on a long, overnight, intercontinental flight while being asked to make rapid and critical decisions throughout the flight. The odds are stacked against the operators when they are uncomfortable and tired in environments that do not fully accommodate their basic physical and task-related needs.
Limited Collaboration
Looking beyond the console, the overall arrangement of the control room tends to provide fixed and somewhat limited collaboration opportunities. People crowded around consoles can distract operators at the very time they need to concentrate on their tasks. Whiteboards may be used to facilitate discussion, but the handwritten notes or printouts stuck to them are often out of date as soon as they are posted. Wall displays, where they are used, are often unable to display the right combination of content needed to coordinate activity across the control room in a particular situation.
External forces also will shape the future of the control room, such as the changing nature of the oil and gas industry. The modern industrial enterprise is more diverse than ever. Changes in available natural resources have placed a greater focus on upstream operations, which are themselves becoming more distributed with the move to coal seam and shale energy sources. As a result, control rooms are increasingly viewed as “operations centers” responsible for a larger range of facilities over an increasingly large geographical area. Operations are more centralized to achieve economies of scale and to make use of increasingly scarce operational skills. The control room is becoming a hub within which a growing number of experts work and collaborate.
The demographics of operational staff are also creating a need for change. The skills shortage caused by the retirement of experienced operators is a well-known issue. Younger, inexperienced operators have different expectations of the job and the work environment. Indicative of this is the way that smartphones, tablets, and personal computers have become a constant feature of modern life that mediates all of our access to information and communication. One consequence of this is that control room staff members are increasingly bringing expectations of how technology should behave in the workplace. This familiarity with technology provides two important opportunities: If technology in the control room behaves in familiar ways, it may make work in the control room more appealing for younger operators; and secondly, it will make the technology easier to use.
Flexible, Scalable
These challenges and trends place an emphasis on providing operators with better situation awareness, greater levels of comfort, and better means of collaborating with one another, with field operators, and with experts outside the control room. The control room must become a more flexible, scalable, and adaptable environment that makes the best use of current and emerging technology to provide operators and their colleagues with the tools they need to run their operations effectively and safely.
So what might the control room of the future look like? We can expect the control room of the future to feature consoles with fewer, larger screens that provide more flexible display layouts. Familiar pan-and-zoom mechanisms will be used to navigate larger displays containing critical information. Consoles will be more responsive to the number of operators present, allowing a single operator to use all of the screen real estate, yet be able to share it with others as needed. The traditional keyboard and mouse will be replaced, or at least supplemented, by touch, gesture, and voice interaction, providing operators with more direct access to information and more natural ways of interacting with the process. The console will include mobile extensions, such as media tablet and smartphone applications that allow operators to maintain situation awareness and to interact with the process as they move away from the console. The physical arrangement of the console will be more flexible, allowing the operator to work sitting or standing in a variety of “lean-in” or “sit-back” positions. Situation awareness for all in the control room will be enhanced through the use of “ambient” displays of critical information, such as alarms.
Another key element of the control room of the future will be the ability to support real-time collaborations as they form and dissolve in response to the operational situation. Intimate, focused collaboration will still occur at the console, but face-to-face collaboration among small groups will be enabled by large touch-screen environments that provide easy access to a wide range of information through simple gestures. Collaboration involving the entire control room will be facilitated by extending this model to wall-sized displays. In each case, the control room provides opportunities for collaboration geared to the differing dynamics of small or large groups. Importantly, collaborations will be able to grow to include more people without losing the content and context of the collaboration. Collaborators will be able to move content from the console to large touch screens to large wall displays as needed. Of course, effective collaboration often involves people in remote locations, perhaps in another part of the site or on the other side of the world. Collaboration mechanisms will bring remote experts into the conversation in a way that allows them to participate fully alongside other collaborators.
A New Reality
And when can we expect this control room of the future to become a reality? Probably much sooner than you might think. Much of the technology required to realize the vision described above is available now or will be available very soon. Technologies such as touch, gesture, and voice interaction are rapidly maturing and finding widespread application in the consumer marketplace. Gartner currently tracks the development of about 45 human/computer interaction technologies, many of which are finding their way into a consumer market filled with eager early adopters. Emerging technologies such as head-mounted displays, gaze control, haptics, brain/computer interfaces, mood recognition, and augmented reality will provide further opportunities for enhancing life for the operator. There will be richer, more natural ways of interacting with the process and the control system. Operator comfort will be further enhanced by adapting the display of information to an operator’s level of alertness and emotional state.
This control room will be a place where the possibilities provided by new technologies meet the needs of the operators and the operations they are responsible for in an environment that is a distinct upgrade from the “economy class” experience of today’s control rooms. It is an exciting time fueled by rapid technological advances.
The control room of the future is just around the corner.
| Jason Urso is vice president and chief technology officer of Honeywell Process Solutions, an organization of 1,300 engineers and support staff who design and develop products for upstream oil and gas, refining, chemicals, and other industries. He has held several engineering and marketing roles since joining the company in 1991. |