User-friendly human machine interface for complex industrial equipment

Customer
TLT Service is a Belarusian supplier of integrated industrial solutions that has developed a hardware/software system for condition monitoring of the hoisting shaft for one of the world’s largest producers of potash fertilizers.

This solution has no alternatives on the global market. The key task was to complement it with a user-friendly and modern visualization software to monitor and manage maintenance procedures.

Challenge
The system requirements:

• Visualization of the mine shaft with convenient mapping of issues;
• Visualization of measurements received from the shaft conveyance;
• Acquisition and visualization of the full data stream (1 kHz) from all sensors;
• Data acquisition and visualization of the average readings (1 - 10 Hz) for the last 5 years of measurements;
• Fast access (0.25 s) to any measurement;
• Logging of maintenance procedures;
• Report generation from any section of the hoisting shaft;
• The use of a single client for different servers with the ability to select a server;
• Adaptation of unmanned scenarios with the full-screen mode, Full HD resolution, and automated system recovery;
• Multimedia content support, such as conversations.

Solution
The Propheto platform was chosen to be the core of the monitoring system. Developed by Applied Systems, this platform provides the data transmission capacity and services necessary for storing, visualizing and analyzing data.

Communication with the core of the Propheto platform is enabled by WCF that ensures the system is distributed and parallel monitoring is available for the shaft operator and the maintenance crew.

The software visualizes complex plots and renders tens of thousands of points with the 2 Hz frequency. The GUI is integrated with such services of the Propheto platform as the alarm handling system, access control system, analytic report generator and more.

We used .NET WPF, Infragistics Chart controls, PRISM, and MEF to develop this complex specialized modular interface.

Results
The HMI design has been conformed and implemented during 12 two-week sprints in close cooperation with the Customer. We planned the sprints and adjusted requirements throughout the development process according to the Customer's feedback.

We also developed the user documentation and provided support for TLT Service during the commissioning and startup processes.