Longwatch compares HMI video to FIX

The latest issue of the Industrial Automation Insider traces the development of PC-based automation systems by Steve Rubin, founder of Intellution and now chief executive officer of Longwatch.

Twenty-five years since the introduction of the FIX (Fully Integrated Control System), Rubin has drawn parallels between his old and new products.

At the ISA Show in October 1984, Rubin and two of his engineers, Al Chisholm and Jim Welch, introduced what they claimed was 'the world's first configurable PC-based HMI/Scada software program'.

Scada systems of the time were epitomised by US data and ran on minicomputers such as DEC VAXs.

By contrast, the FIX comprised a 'multitasking shell' developed by Chisholm for MS-DOS running on a 640k IBM PC with two floppy-disk drives and communicating with local I/O.

Back at base in Westwood, Massachusetts, the other two members of the team, Dave Nelson and Paul Vanslette, were working on an I/O driver toolkit and interfaces to Basic, 'C' and Fortran.

Intellution's most notable achievement was to convince automation engineers that the PC and PC-based graphics were serious tools for industrial automation.

Rubin said: 'Our biggest problem was convincing sceptical engineers that MS-DOS was reliable enough to use in a plant.

'Our engineers had devised a way to partition MS-DOS so that normal Microsoft programs ran in one partition in the computer, while the HMI/Scada software ran in the other partition under its own real-time operating system, and the two were completely separate.

'A crash of MS-DOS did not affect the FIX,' he added.

Intellution went on to develop further innovations, including FIX ACE, a co-processor card that segmented the real-time data operations into a protected environment; the FIX DMACS distributed industrial data acquisition and control solution; and the IFIX automation application platform.

It was acquired by Emerson in 1995, which used Intellution's technology as the basis for the HMI for DeltaV, which set the pattern for DCS development right up to the present day.

Intellution has since been sold on to GE Fanuc, Welch is now chief executive officer of Marathon Software and Nelson is with IBM in a business-development role.

Rubin, Chisholm and Vanslette are back together at Longwatch, developing what they believe will be the next revolution in HMI/Scada, integrating real video into automation applications.

Rubin said: 'HMI screens are avatars of what's really going on in the field.

'Most operators sit at HMI displays and stare at trends, flashing icons, and graphic representations of a process or assembly line, but they really can't see what's happening in the plant.

'By putting video directly onto the HMI screen, operators can correlate what is actually happening with the various data that's being collected,' he added.

Moreover, by archiving the plant-video feeds, it is possible to reconstruct an incident, showing images from the HMI at the time and plant data from a process historian.

The concept is in its infancy but Longwatch already has several dozen systems installed in water and wastewater, power generation, natural-gas processing and other applications.

'We expect video to be as big a revolution in HMI technology as PC-based control was 25 years ago,' concluded Rubin.

Back to top