A mo­bile tool for field op­er­a­tors to in­ter­act with DCS-controlled equipment.

Field op­er­a­tors in in­dus­trial sites, such as oil and gas re­finer­ies, face the dif­fi­culty of in­ter­act­ing with re­motely con­trolled phys­i­cal equip­ment. A field op­er­a­tor might be stand­ing in front of a valve, but have lit­tle pos­si­bil­ity for con­trol­ling that valve, or find­ing out its sta­tus. Much of their in­ter­ac­tion needs to be me­di­ated via ra­dio con­tact with the con­trol room. This has some pe­riph­eral ben­e­fits as con­trol room op­er­a­tors are bet­ter aware of ac­tiv­ity in the field, but can be the cause of un­nec­es­sary ra­dio con­ges­tion and mis­takes.

Munin was an ex­plo­ration of in-field con­trol of equip­ment. Using an in­dus­trial mo­bile de­vice, users can pick up the RFID tag of a piece of equip­ment, open its face­plate and con­trol it. In this demon­stra­tor sys­tem, we in­te­grated an ac­tual mo­tor and stan­dard ABB con­trol soft­ware and hard­ware to show fea­si­bil­ity.

More

• “Interaction with the dirty, dan­ger­ous, and dull.” Heyer, C. and Husøy, K. (2012). in­ter­ac­tions 19, 4 (July 2012), pp. 19-23. ACM Press
• “Investigations of Ubicomp in the Oil and Gas Industry.” Heyer, C. (2010) In Proceedings of the 12th ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UBICOMP2010), Copenhagen, Denmark. ACM, New York, pp. 61-64. ACM Portal