autoHMI: a model driven software engineering approach for HMIs in process industries

In process industries the Human Machine Interfaces (HMI) for the Supervisory Control Systems are built at the very end of the planning phase because of the many interdependencies of engineering data. These HMIs consist of a hierarchy of graphical displays that illustrate the chemical process and its automation system. Today, these displays are derived manually from the plant's piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&ID) and other sources. We present a model driven software engineering solution to automatically generate the HMI directly from engineering data. At the core of the algorithm there are two models - a concept and task model describing the process and its structure, and an abstract HMI-model describing the interaction space. This article describes the design and structure of these models as well as the chain of transformations that are necessary to generate supervisory control HMIs for the process industries. A case study shows the scope and limitations of this approach.