ISA Forms Human-Machine Interface Standards Committee

June 16, 2005

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The Instrumentation, Systems, and Automation Society (ISA) formed a new standards development committee to address human-machine interface (HMI) issues.

The committee, ISA-SP101, was established to provide HMI guidelines and standards to:

Reduce operator mistakes and misinterpretations via clear and intuitive representations of conditions and operator control interfaces.
Reduce learning curves for new operators and allow operators to move from one system to another (often within the same plant) with minimal retraining.
Assist communications and reduce errors between geographically dispersed groups.
Reduce costs of re-invention.
Reduce re-work by solving differences in design philosophies.
Enable applications to be developed using HMI features that will be supported in future systems and HMI upgrades.

Initial priorities for ISA-SP101 include:

Menu hierarchies.
Screen navigation conventions.
Graphics and color standards.
Dynamic elements.
Alarming conventions.
Security methods.
Electronic signature attributes.
Interfaces with background programming and historical databases.
Popup conventions.
Help screens and methods used to work with alarms.
Program object interfaces.

Other items to be addressed include configuration interfaces to databases, servers, OLE servers and networks.

The overall scope of the HMI standards project is intended to cover all sectors of process and discrete manufacturing.

"Great care must be used in developing HMI standards to avoid being industry-specific," said Douglas Peck, project engineer with Middough Consulting Inc. and ISA-SP101 committee member. "You do not want to develop a standard that is embraced by the process industries, for example, but totally rejected by the manufacturing industries."

Individuals wishing to participate or provide input may contact Charley Robinson of ISA Standards at crobinson@isa.org or (919) 990-9213.

Source: Instrumentation, Systems, and Automation Society.