Combining Image Capture with Monitoring

I'd been looking around for an article on the relationship between image capture and more conventional

Hi Tech on Australia's oldest bridge

measurement and instrumentation.

In SCADA systems there have been instances I recall where image capture can be triggered by door movement for security purposes.  The door opens, the person or animal coming in [yes Kangaroos can open doors] triggers an image capture - where the image captured is then uploaded to the central control room.

Software Patents Determination of Interest

Is it time to re-think Patents ?

Read in CNN Tech today that a legal determination had been made re 'computer implemented inventions'.  The judgement decision was against and Australian companies seeking legal patent protection for an Idea re-implemented in software.  This was turned down where the basic argument quoted was:-

"Merely requiring generic computer implementation fails to transform that abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention," said Justice Clarence Thomas.

Interesting and we wait to see what happens next given that many Software Companies may look again at what can be Patented effectively.  It looks like mere transformation of an abstract idea by generic computer implementation will not henceforth not make the cut.

Of course in the systems group we are continually transforming abstract ideas into reality.  Sometimes it requires the use of software and sometimes hardware components.  The Bas Relief in the photo - patents look to be child's play.  Somehow I'm not sure Software companies will see it quite like that in the future.

Here is a brief history on PATENTs which I also thought summarized things well..
Boston College Link Presentation on History of Patents

Photo by takomabibelot entitled Terra-Cotta Bas Relief By Caspar Buberl In The Old Patent Office Great Hall (Washington, DC) under licence cc by 2.0

After the 1877 fire, six allegorical reliefs by Buberl were installed in the Great Hall (just outside the Model Hall). Accompanying this allegory of "Industry and Invention" are reliefs depicting Fire, Electricity and Magnetism, Water, Agriculture, and Mining.

Playing DICE with Dr Diesel's Moteur to reduce CO2 Intensity

The Plaque at Musee des Arts et Metiers - Paris

When you look at causality between Carbon in the atmosphere climbing rapidly since the industrial revolution and seemingly going over the top of the 'carbon budget' (the point at which global warming and climate change become uncontrollable), there has to be a way to make the production of energy more efficient vs amount of produced atmospheric Carbon.

The search for a more efficient combustion engine has been since the many trials and failed engines invented by Rudolf Diesel. The world owes much to Dr Diesel for getting us started with what must be one of the most prolific work engines used throughout the world today.  Recently there has been work done to improve the engine to take alternate forms of black liquid fuel.

Back to BauHaus

Convergence

So far when I think of Windows 8 as a possibility for control systems visualization I think mainly of the International Style and it's Euro roots in Bauhaus and the re-interpretation of that in the way in which Microsoft Windows 8 is designed.

So.. Many interactive surfaces or UIs as they are now known are starting to converge using similar design principles to allow their convergence, not only as individual user experiences, but to allow those same users to shift between for example mobile phones, tablets, PC, video walls and allow the user to interact and re-design their experience to a certain level within a design principles framework.

In our own space, the design fault lines are evaporating rapidly between SCADA, SAFETY and CONTROL.

This in such a way that it won't be too long before even this blog has to be renamed into something more convergent with Foxboro's control product .... Foxboro Evo.

Photo: CC Licence : by Dalbera on Flickr for Convergence (Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine)

What just happened and why ? - Unravel the domino effect with SOEs in SCADA

The Domino Effect

From at least the early 1990s when I discovered SCADA so to speak, I wondered what on earth SCADA meant by Sequence of Events and tended to reject the whole idea until I understood why ?

I had come myself from a world of real-time control when everything was current to the actual time and data from one controller was highly sequenced with that of another.  The era of the PLC and it's great contribution to sequencing of - read inputs, calculate logic, write outputs was a pretty fundamental design I had thought.

Are you Alert or just Waiting dear M2M machine

ALERT

Are you alert, or is it just waiting for the situation to pass.  Are you alert for something which might happen, something perhaps with danger requiring your constant situational awareness, or is it just waiting for the expected alarm when the pressure gets to high.

To what extent we confuse normal events, like the sun coming up and the sun going down with an alert meaning something just broke and you are in trouble or security was breached and you need to shutdown or burn everything.

Alerts are the output of a process which is monitoring the 'danger' domain, and the production of alerts needs to be meaningful, particularly when possibly mixed with Alarms, Events, Off-Normals and basic normal data.

How might we best characterize them ?

• Normal Data : No need to look at it - no need to act - maybe to fine tune - maybe to optimize, but no real danger involved and not a high priority.
• Event Data : Events record what happens, usually on a change of status of an item of plant, or perhaps an operator action for later audit purposes.
• ALARM : Alarms record a transgression of a limit or potential hazard developing.  Alarms are useful for managing situations post a disturbance event.
• ALERT : Alerts are a new category for most and I like to refer to Alerts as being from a higher form of intelligence and or situational awareness which characterize and inform of imminent danger or unexpected behaviour.

When observing animal behavior in the wild, you will see that the animal engages all of it's senses and the senses of it's herd to determine whether there is danger or not.  Animals often go from relaxed or waiting to high stages of alert within seconds based on the situation.  It is generally not just one input, but many which need to be correlated to determine that 'danger exists' and it is the function of 'situational assessment' to figure out whether 'danger' could exist.

Whether real-time systems are intelligent enough to correlate enough data to provide a higher level of reasoning required for an ALERT is a debate to be had, however we are now approaching the levels of computing and industrial software capability to provide a higher order ALERT system rather than the simpler more fundamental Data, Events and Alarm systems currently implemented.

Photo: Alert by paralog  under licence CC BY-ND 2.0

Man vs Machine

Alert ! - situational awareness, the concept of knowing a complex dynamic
situation and being able to decide and act on it quickly, and more importantly, decide better and faster than the adversary would have.  Situational Awareness[SA] seems to have derived out of aerial combat and the complex spaces which arise in air traffic control towers.  More recently there have been some papers written about the application to the complex dynamic situations which can now arise in the modern industrial/process control room.

 who is the enemy ?

It all seems good, however I wonder if there is a basic premise that is being missed.

John Boyd, a great military strategist defined the OODA [Observe Orient Decide Act] loop for the benefit of better understanding how combatant strategies can be modelled and their interaction determined. Situational Awareness has adopted this model and defines itself as the state of knowledge pertaining to a dynamic situation or filtering of that knowledge to enable fast strategic decisions to be made.  Shifting from the military domain to the industrial domain, one is left wondering how situational awareness in the classic sense really applies. Who is the enemy ?

For the military situation, an fighter's strategy or tactics are in play continually against the enemy, yet in the plant, the operator is not pitted against an intelligent machine [at least not yet] but rather has to control the machine for an emerging situation which might generally be unforeseen.  The operator's frame is not continually shifting, but dealing with well know operational points.

Some of the process of Situational Assessment, or the gathering of appropriate data to enable fast real-time operational decisions to be made should be effective for control rooms, but the requirement to continually shift the awareness frame based on an enemy counter strategy seems not to apply.
Therefore - does the rest of the whole set of situational awareness technologies really apply ?

Feel free to comment on situational awareness in general and more specifically the way it might work for your control room situation.

References
The role of Situation Awareness for the Operators of Process Industry Salman Nazir, Simone Colombo, Davide Manca*

John Boyd's OODA Loop Wiki