Industrial HMI design principles for highly automated manufacturing
processes
Authors: Bryksin Matvei , Vysotsky Nikita , Guseynov Pavel 
Published: July 2023

The number of industrial robotic installations in Asia, Europe and the
Americas is continuously growing every year, and a forecast from the
International Federation of Robotics (IFR) shows that these values will
increase more in the future. Process automation level measured by
operational industrial robots relative to the number of factory employees is
getting higher in the multiple industries of mass and serial production.
With the expansion of robotic-based solutions and automation tools for
manufacturing processes, the industrial HMI (human-machine interface)
integration to operations management becomes vital for end users to operate
efficiently on the daily basics. As a result, each equipment vendor and
software solution provider supplies custom HMI screens, which makes the lack
of a homogeneous user experience one of the main issues for rapidly growing
Industry 4.0 applications. Intuitive interfaces and well-designed
human-machine interaction improve visibility to robotics cell operators,
prevent them from unexpected errors and allow maintenance engineers to
recover from faults and resolve issues quickly in case of line stoppages.
Usually, such interfaces support the factory commissioning phase, and after
a successful launch and go-live decision, the integration team handovers
commissioned system to the operations team after training with personnel and
the hypercare period. As an Industry standard, the main problems that
Industrial HMI solves are factory operations use cases and essential
manufacturing business processes: production management and process control,
process and equipment configuration, equipment monitoring and diagnostics,
reactive and predictive maintenance management, historical reporting and
analytics, health and safety. To be able to design, develop and release to
production user interfaces for specific manufacturing and assembly
processes, we provide the HMI product design framework and design principles
for configurable scalable factory interfaces. Using such an industrial HMI
framework, the development team can rapidly prototype and build
custom-tailored applications from existing tested and validated components
and keep a holistic user experience across multiple sites. Flexible product
architecture for HMI applications allows automation integration businesses
to deliver to the end user robust UI solutions with a high level of
accessibility to control robotic cells and lines supporting specific process
implementations in different production environments. The central proposal
of this paper is the design framework and design principles for configurable
industrial HMI based on the product strategy that allows the creation of
customised interfaces on demand. The principle methodologies of the design
system presented in the paper have been validated and tested through
multiple research studies and continuous product improvements in the
production environment. Several HMI solutions have been integrated into
automotive production, composite materials manufacturing, high-voltage
modules production and battery assembly, transportation and warehouses with
autonomous mobile robots. The research and automation community can use
described approaches to design better human-computer interaction for their
HMI solution and dramatically improve the user experience of using them.