About Situational Awareness
Improve operator effectiveness by filtering out visual noise and providing a clearer context for actionable data.
Nearly half of all abnormal situations in the plant are the result of human error, partly because traditional HMIs complicate matters by presenting too much information without context. Putting operators on the spot to decide which information matters most can compromise critical operations. Situational awareness solves this challenge by presenting the user with highly-contextualized and easily-interpreted information that is specific to the most important process issues while filtering out the noise that distracts operators.
Operators experience several benefits including:
- Faster problem identification
- Maximised uptime
- Reduced alarms and accelerated alarm recognition
- Increased operational consistency
- Fewer errors
- Empowered workforce
Success in Numbers
Independent evaluations of situational awareness strategies report a five-fold improvement in detecting abnormal situations before system availability is impacted, a 37% improvement in the success rate for handling abnormal situations when they occur, and a 41% reduction in the time required to complete tasks.
Situational Awareness Essentials
The following principles are at the core of our Situational Awareness functionality and design:
Goal Oriented
The end game is always process improvement, not process representation for its own sake.
Human-Centered Design
Helping you do your job better, not just navigating around a PID loop.
Visual Optimisation
Designs are easy on the eyes, not awash in Technicolor. Colors are used only to flag critical metrics and progress.
Highly Interactive
Displays and dashboards are easy to navigate, and content refines automatically based on user input.
Custom Contextualisation
Screens are tailored to the decision support needs of operators, remote technicians, managers, and other users.
What Makes Situational Awareness Different?
Although all approaches to Situational Awareness seek to improve the User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX), the underlying practices, standards, design tools, and methodologies can vary considerably.
The AVEVA Situational Awareness Symbol Library goes beyond simple graphics and provides highly valuable and reusable design elements that simplify HMI design and maintenance – saving time, effort, and cost, including up to 70% in design time.
Modern industrial systems continue to grow in complexity and geographically at an ever-accelerating pace. This growth introduces new challenges including: vastly increased volumes of data, increased operator training requirements and staffing issues, and having to meet the needs of a highly mobile workforce. Such changes require a whole new approach to industrial process visualization. It requires a more systematic approach to delivering situational awareness, which requires intuitive and easy-to-use UI design tools and pre-configured symbols. Designs must be based on principles proven to translate highly dynamic process data into actionable information and effective decision making.
The AVEVA Situational Awareness Symbols Library helps application developers meet these challenges by offering a design approach devoted to providing operators with the most relevant and necessary information at the right time. Operators see the situation at hand in full context and in real time, with reference to how it links to previous events and where the process might be headed. Such an accurate visual combination of past, present, and potential consequences results in exceptionally improved understanding, opportunistic analysis, and reaction time. This leads to more timely and effective critical decision making.
Explore Our Situational Awareness Enabled Products
Our leading HMI and SCADA software has been specifically designed to incorporate situational awareness principles that help you empower your operators and optimize your operations.
AVEVA System Platform, formerly Wonderware
Contextualize operations with responsive, standards-driven, and scalable software for deploying advanced SCADA, MES, and IIoT. Unify people, processes, and assets.
AVEVA™ Plant SCADA
Formerly Known As Citect SCADA
AVEVA Plant SCADA (formerly Citect SCADA) is the leading flexible, high-performance supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system for industrial-process and infrastructure customers.
AVEVA InTouch HMI, formerly Wonderware
Formerly Known As InTouch HMI
AVEVA InTouch HMI is HMI visualization software for operators to achieve real-time operations visibility. The world’s most widely used plant HMI for process monitoring and control.
Situational Awareness News and Resources
Check out the latest news, blogs, events, webinars, and success stories.
