Designing and validating safety components in Valmet's automation system

Abstract

Safety components and protocols are a crucial part of any automation process. The goal of this thesis is to design and validate safety components for Valmet’s automation system. This research explores three research questions: the flexibility of current guidelines to support new components, find ways to improve the effectiveness of the safety components’ design, and to answer if the new designs satisfy the user needs by providing clear communication about the emergency. The study was conducted in several phases. The first step was to understand the requirements of the safety components, and that was achieved by doing three semi-structured interviews and a focus group with industry experts. The gathered insights helped drive the design process to create the safety components. Ten semi-structured interviews, and surveys were taken from the on-field operators that helped validate the concepts and designs for the safety components. The study revealed that 80% of the operators could differentiate between the normal and the safety components. It can be concluded that the designs are effective in communicating the emergency just by their visuals. The study also validates the use of black and white stripes to show the emergency related to the safety components as it uses the already existing mental model from the real-life danger/warning zones. Moreover, the study also proves the flexibility of current guidelines available for normal components.