Control Rooms
Designing a new control room, rehabilitating old structures to accommodate a new generation control system or reorganising control rooms to meet a new operating philosophy: the control room is the heart of the plant, and the management and operator focal point.
ClearView's design department takes care of all aspects, from design through to construction and start-up, addressing issues including :
- Control Building 's location and architecture
- Building resistance to blast and thermic flux
- Architecture and civil engineering.
- O perators, workload and management.
- Software and man-machine interface design
- Equipment, furniture, and industrial design including:
- Technical furniture
- Buildings works
- Suspended ceilings
- Electrical services
- Air conditioning
- Full decoration
- Floor covering
- UPS and Generators
- Mechanical services
Control Room Design
The design of the control room should provide maximum workspace and optimum layout to enable viewing of necessary visual displays, with maximum ease of control.
The first defining factor that will influence a control room design and capability is space. This will affect the size, number, layout and positioning of workstations.
Pillars in the way can limit design options, as can low ceilings. Windows are good to have for natural light, but they can also have a major impact on reflection and heat, while noise disturbances can make an environment uncomfortable and excessive vibration can cause problems with equipment.
Custom-built control rooms where space factors are designed according to what is required from the operation are critical.
Lighting is also an important feature with controlled lighting for each workstation being available. Ideally, reflective or recessed lighting should be used and complemented by natural lighting where possible. One needs to avoid strong backlight where operators are looking at monitors with a strong light source directly behind the monitor. Traditional fluorescent lighting is one of the worst things to have in a control room yet it is typically all too common. I find that in many cases operators prefer to switch off lighting because it is generating too much glare or is uncomfortable, with the result that many control rooms operate in a fairly dark and gloomy atmosphere.
There is a move away from the traditional wooden consoles with CRT screens to a more modern flat screen design and more spacious desks to work on. LCD and plasma screens have allowed much greater flexibility in the design features of workstations or consoles.
The layout of screens and controls is one of the most important factors in control room design. There is also a strong move away from having as many pictures as possible on a set of monitors in front of the operators. Operators can only look at so much information at a time, and the purpose of the surveillance and control needs to be equated with the nature, size, and positioning of the display monitors.
Operators should always have a spot monitor and the size of the picture relative to the distance of the operator away from the screen is important. There is an increasing move to large screens (eg, 42 inch LCD) which is useful as long as the large screen is not just used to fit as many images on as possible. Work can be organised with control programmes and multiple video images in various configurations being displayed on screen. However, one needs to ensure that the resolution of large screens provides what you need to see in terms of activities or identification from your cameras.
Two key factors that will make or break a control room's effectiveness are 'line of sight' and 'angle of sight'. Line of sight refers to how the eyes are positioned relative to the monitors that are being viewed. Poor screen positioning can lead to poor effectiveness and health issues.
Desk space is another important factor. Operators typically have to use keyboards, mice, joysticks and other control equipment along with communications devices Log books and documentation must also be completed while all of the other devices are still on the desk ready for use in operating the system. Usable desk space is therefore critical.
Similarly, when operators pull their chairs into a desk, the leg space is going to determine whether they are comfortable, or whether they have to sit away from the desks in order to have a comfortable seating position. This issue is also important in terms of circulation and body posture.
What is visually impressive is not necessarily the most effective. The best designed control rooms are often those where the most thought has gone into what needs to be accomplished in the control room. A number of recently designed control rooms show that one can not only look good, but can be highly functional as well.