Managing HMI utilities for control systems

Abstract

The supervisor of this project, Origo Engineering AS delivers complete control and automation systems for the oil industry and smelting plants. Each hardware and software package is custom‐made. A part of the functionality is implemented by scripts – small programs that are coded and run directly on a Human Machine Interface (HMI) server. This method has some challenges, which are listed and further described in this report. Those challenges increase the time and cost of producing the control and automation system. The purpose of this master thesis is to design a solution that will solve those challenges. The solution system is called Utility Framework Server. The intentions and design of a Utility Framework Server, an application for managing utilities for control systems that can replace the scripts that are placed on the HMI server, and an implementation of a prototype for it, are further described in the report. The research project has investigated possible technologies for the solution, and how they can participate in improving the current challenges. Service orientation and component‐oriented programming were chosen as the methods for the solution. The reasons for this choice are also presented in the report. The architecture has been defined based on analysis of the specifications for the system. The prototype for the defined architecture has been implemented using Windows Communication Foundation and .NET. Some clients that can use the services presented by the server have also been implemented for testing the prototype.