Pipe Animations, Yes or No??

[cardosocea]

Hello,

I've searched long and hard for this and found a great thread from 2008 about animating pipes and it turned out it was a bit of a flame war for both camps.

I'm firmly on the position of no pipe animation because the system should have alarming, interlocking indication and a textual display of the state of the process/plant. If it runs phases, it should indicate the phase name and phase step which makes it easier overall to assess more than a pipe's state.

But I'd like to hear from the rest of you what you think and also if there's any standard documenting whether you should or shouldn't and why for both. Does anyone have more information or experience on this?

 

[JesperMP]

Examples of these 'pipe animations', 'phase steps' ?
Not sure if we a talking about the same thing, but we have some air and fluid pipes, and we indicate with color animation when the pipe is 'not sending' and 'sending'.

I'm firmly on the position of no pipe animation because the system should have alarming, interlocking indication and a textual display of the state of the process/plant.

In my experience, purely text-based status information is for some operators hard to understand.
A few simple graphical indicators is what they want. Emphasis on both 'few' and 'simple'.
And colors are easy to understand. We have grey=incative, bright green=active, yellow=warning, red=faulted. Colors only used when they make sense. So for pipes only grey and green are used.

 

[BryanG]

Not pipe animations, but I wondered if the story might help. A customer complained that there were too many decimal places showing on screen and that it confused the system operators. I modified the HMI program so that they could set the number of decimal places themselves. Next I get a call that the HMI had frozen, it hadn't, it was just that by them over reducing the number of decimal places the values now appeared to be static. Moral of the story for me was to always have something on screen that changes second by second. It could just be a clock, or maybe a simple pipe animation, you know that something is alive if it is moving. Maybe we should apply the Glasgow Coma Scale to HMIs

 

[JesperMP]

I have in the lower right of every screen a bar that snakes its way from left to right, just to indicate that the HMI is online with the PLC. If the HMI goes offline, it goes static and changes to red color.

Maybe we should apply the Glasgow Coma Scale to HMIs

Had to google that one.

 

[JesperMP]

Rereading cardosocea's post, I realize that he probably talks about a kind of progress bar animation for sequences.
I actually have a text-based sequence status indicator, that changes color based on the overall state. However, I am finding that it is problematic.

When the sequence increments rapidly, the text becomes a blur that is more distracting than helpful.
And if the sequence increments slowly, the operator thinks that the process is frozen. To counter the latter I have included in the text the process value that is being worked towards, i.e.:
Step 5. Heating. Actual=91.5°C, Set=120.0°C.
If the sequence is waiting for a time to expire, I include that:
Step 6. Mixing. Actual=30.2sec, Set=100.0sec.
The operator then see something changing on the screen.

I am thinking about changing the texts to a simple progress bar. It takes a lot of work to make the texts, especially if you are an OEM that makes programs for many languages. And the value for the operator is questionable.
What he needs to know, is the machine or process running yes/no, and if not, why is it not running. The latter must be described as detailed as possible in an error message.

This is definitely something everyone have an opinion about.

 

[robertmee]

The current ISA high performance HMI standards strictly no pipe animations. Too distracting. A process screen should be mostly muted and static with movement and color only indicating an adverse condition. I get the resistance by many to go this route...I was in that camp. But now having done a few and broke the paradigm, I and operators see the value.

 

[SCADA_Joe]

I agree with robertmee, animations and specifically pipe animation can be distracting but sometimes in the right circumstance it makes sense.

I have advised against it and not done it in some of my water treatment facilities applications where the flow is more-or-less A to B to C type of steps. Valve and pump indications are enough here.

I have advised for and implemented it in a protein manufacturing plant where there where many intricate paths, valves (+100), and CIP processes and it made sense for the operator to see the path and its state quickly and clearly.

I would ask your self 'Does the animation add value?', 'Is it enough value to justify being on a main or auxiliary screen?', and probably the most important ' What is the operators thoughts?'. For the last one I would mock up both and put them in front of them.

Hope my none-answer is of some value....

@robetmee - just curious if you have the ISA publication number for my own notes. Thanks!

 

[parky]

I also agree, pipe animations take a lot of time, probably nobody takes much notice, however, I did one project on a large manufacturing system where the customer insisted on it.
I must admit that in this case it looked quite good, showed the process flow i.e. product or CIP (brown & Pink) & the operators loved iot, from a distance they could see what was going & where although there was text fields showing in more detail exactly what the processes were doing.
One thing that got me worried wasd one customer had been given a demostration of a system (wonderware) the demo by the rep showed 3D rendering of the pipework, valves (just like the pictures you see of the valves with animations even turning), the customer wanted this, but after we told him the extra cost of the development he backed down.

 

[cardosocea]

Examples of these 'pipe animations', 'phase steps' ?
Not sure if we a talking about the same thing, but we have some air and fluid pipes, and we indicate with color animation when the pipe is 'not sending' and 'sending'.

Sorry, should have been more specific. I mean, in a process plant like chemicals for example where if a pipe is transferring fluid through it, it will animate with a certain colour. This is both hard to engineer and in my opinion not a lot of value.

By phases, I mean the ISA88 definition of Phases, it should show it's in Running, Starting, Hold, state and if that phase follows a sequence, it's easy to add a step number and step description. These very rarely happen in such speed that will make the text blurry but tell you straight away what's happening.

A few simple graphical indicators is what they want. Emphasis on both 'few' and 'simple'.

This is why valves and pumps are animated in my opinion, it provides detail to see what is open.
If a step is timed or has a timer associated with it, I also leave that running to display that things are going.

It could just be a clock, or maybe a simple pipe animation, you know that something is alive if it is moving.

I did have a similar issue as yours, but it was to reduce from 2 to 1 decimal place... in this case, the remaining decimal place also moved, but that second one made all the difference between 100.01 and 100.02...

The current ISA high performance HMI standards strictly no pipe animations. Too distracting. A process screen should be mostly muted and static with movement and color only indicating an adverse condition. I get the resistance by many to go this route...I was in that camp. But now having done a few and broke the paradigm, I and operators see the value.

I installed a system with 4 reactors where this was a redline from me (the site controls engineer) because I could already see never ending punch lists and scratching my head trying to later on add or remove a valve and deal with animations. Of course there were people against any change but as the system started and I took onboard some of the valuable feedback from them to minimize navigation,etc... no one mentioned the animated lines because no one spent any time in a screen with animated lines...
They had an overview page of the 4 reactors with the important stuff like temperatures, pressure and the recipe stage and that was it... all they did was to open prompts, do whatever was requested of them and carry on in that one page. Animating pipes would have been a waste of time and money.

 

[I_Automation]

I do pump and valve animations. And did for vibrators too.

Only once did I do a pipe animation and that was for a cooling pipe in a tank. That changed from grey-OFF to light blue-ON

This valve animation showing flow might also be considered a pipe animation by some.

 

[TPress]

I used them once in a system, but my decision to spend the time was based on the system having 3-way valves in the process lines.

3-way valves aren't very intuitive and the valve status was hard to show clearly... it's not open/close, it's open to line A or open to Line B. It was also an application where the operator just glanced at the screen occasionally as they worked vs. sitting at a console. I ended up just putting green flashing arrows in the active pipeline (that weren't visible when the pipe was inactive), so it was easy to copy, paste, resize, etc. In the end, it looked pretty slick when running and didn't take nearly as much time as I anticipated.

 

[John Morris]

https://www.marinetech.org/files/marine/files/Curriculum/IROV/Module13/gruhnhmidesignreviewed-110722135448-phpapp02.pdf

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

 

[parky]

2 or 3 way valves are easy our standard was effectively a square box for the infeed & two triangles or 3 for the direction the standard was grey for non energised, green for open or direction & flashing green/white while moving (not that it took that long) & Flashing Red/Yellow for fault. John is right ask the operator, remember I was involved in a project for an experimental soup system, the guy who did most of the programming had added some boxes for the additions these were just square boxes with white border & flashing red/orange when out of tollerance & green when additions were correct, did not think it looked very good so I removed them on a re-write for a new PLC, however, thought I would change the colour of the text messages as to what it was doing i.e. flashing red/orange while out of tollerance & white when in tollerance & addition complete (note some additions were manual so the operator could see when the manual additions were within tollerance, I completed the software but never got to commission it as the company I worked for went into liquidation, the guy who commissioned it (one of our engineers who also was made redundant but worked on the customers site full time) phoned me up to ask me a question he also told me the operators wanted to re-instate these ugly boxes oh well, I thought the message colour did the same job but looked better however, the operators thought different.

 

[robertmee]

https://www.marinetech.org/files/marine/files/Curriculum/IROV/Module13/gruhnhmidesignreviewed-110722135448-phpapp02.pdf

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

This follows the High Performance standard I posted earlier. The animation of valves, spinning pumps, fluid flow in pipes, etc should be avoided. Red and Green are also to avoided as many are red green color blind. Use grey, black and white for high contrast where possible.

 

[mburtis]

I'm also on the high performance hmi bandwagon. I'm happy it's slowly gaining traction in the industry. I really like the embedded trends and other awareness centered graphics. It's ISA 101 if anyone wants to look it up. There's some really good examples on realpars as well.