News

November 2007

What a trip! We got back on November 2nd from a visit to Australia starting in Sydney then flying to Perth to visit our Honeywell friends and share a very nice steak. We drove down to Bunbury to visit Worsley and their super new control room which is getting a lot of hot press. It was great to see them come full circle. I was sharing with the new employees that we started this project over 10 years ago. First, they were looking at replacing one of their existing field control rooms but through the dedication of their control engineers they moved to a centralized control room with good alarm management practices and state of the art ASM Compliant Graphics. They are a shining example of what good looks like.

From Perth, we took a flight to Brisbane and started two new projects (one in Gladstone) which was a pleasant drive up the coast road the M1/A1 road. We visited with friends from England in Gimpy and then meet up with more Honeywell friends in Brisbane to start a new project in South Africa. Quite a busy period - three control rooms in a 2 week period. Our journey home was quite a trip flying from Brisbane to Sydney, then Sydney to Auckland, New Zealand which reminded me of the wonderful times I have had there on both the North and South Islands, I must go back there soon.

No sooner had we been home and it was time to leave again for New Orleans and another large control room project. The thing about New Orleans is it is a great place to visit but really hard to get there and back due to the lack of flights and the number of visitors it gets; every flight is full to capacity.

Before I could time zone adjust, I left on November 13th for Sweden and Linkopin University where I will be giving a two day lecture on Human Factors and in particular Situation Awareness and Control Room Design to a group of students. The following week I will be in Norway giving the keynote address at the control room and alarm management conference in Stavanger and then meeting with more Honeywell friends and visiting some customers in Norway. Quite a good Honeywell fellowship month, we are working with Honeywell folks in 5 countries at the moment, after 10 years working for Honeywell in Phoenix before starting UCDS. One of the highlights in my time with Honeywell was meeting Honeywell folks around the world, and it is pleasure to meet up with them again and help them provide ASM Solutions to their customers.

In December, we will be starting new control room projects in Pittsburg and Canada. As I have stated before, it is wonderful to see so many new control room projects - this must be a record year. It is great to see Mike Smith of Smith LaRock Architecture doing well. We have had the pleasure of doing a few projects together. It is nice to see an Architect that has no ego and wants to do a great job for his customers, we certainly enjoy working with him and his firm. The renderings Mike does now are difficult to distinguish from a photograph of the finished product.

A closing thought - -- Each control room we see has one feature that really challenges owners, architects, control engineers, etc. and that is glare on computer screens, and general lighting of control rooms. The standards target us to have lighting levels of 500 Lux but most control rooms end up below 200 Lux. How do we resolve this problem? When the controls group moves the HMI screens from black to grey, we have a good starting point but we must also consider the contrast. If walls are painted with colors that have greater than a 3:1 luminance ratios eye fatigue will be the result.