Challenges in Advanced Visualization in Industry 4.0: New Ways of Working

Importance Of The Dcs Operator Screens

DCS are devices that manage several thousands of analogic and digital signals; and have a distributed architecture, which increases considerably their reliability and availability. However, its essential feature is the intensive interaction with the operator, since he/she is the one who has to do the key decisions about the operation of the process under his/her control.

Then, they are an Information System (IS) of extremely important characteristics, because from it depends the success or fault of an enterprise of any type. From a general conceptual perspective, an IS have suffered multiple evolutions over time. Still, despite this development, most authors continue to consider IS as technological solutions aimed at supporting organizations in their daily business activities and addressing the constant challenges imposed by their own environment (Chaparro-Peláez, n.d.). Supporting is the key word, because what we do in an DCS is to serve as a support of the way the enterprise should do all changes in its environment. In addition, nowadays, visualization is one of the highest challenges enterprises must face. We should remember that the principal idea is to earn money from the activity of the enterprise.

The first DCS in 1975 by Honeywell and called TDC 2000. The operator interface, of the DCS of this time based on a CRT (Cathode Ray Tube), which allowed a very elementary representation of the data of the industrial process. The monitor was connected directly to the DCS or was connected via a serial communication port. This operator display showed the information in textual format and through bar diagrams, which limited the amount of process data that could be viewed. In addition, the format was very unintuitive and forced the operator to do an effort to interpret the numerical values he/she perceived. Finally, the operator had a keypad and/or keyboard to send commands to the DCS.