Fluxys’ Flow Engineers at the central control room perform the complex task of planning and monitoring gas flows through the transmission system in real-time. For the new gas-flow planning tool, POLARIS, the human-machine interface (HMI) was therefore of major concern.

1. A gas-flow planning tool time since Q3 2003 – present duration ongoing

2. About Fluxys Fluxys is the independent operator of the natural gas transport, transit grid and storage infrastructure in Belgium. business to business

3. A gas-flow planning tool Fluxys’ Flow Engineers at the central control room perform the complex task of planning and monitoring gas flows through the transmission system in real-time. For the new gas-flow planning tool, POLARIS, the human-machine interface (HMI) was therefore of major concern. discipline interaction designinformation architecture

5. Requirements analysis

6. Scenarios of use

7. Conceptual design

9. Flow Engineer position and business context diagram Field Study We observed the daily practice of gas flow planning and studied the highly complex business context. The Flow Engineers’ real-time tasks require constant attention as crucial data are continuously updated from other applications and human operators.

10. Sample from the Requirements analysis report Requirements analysis We facilitated requirement workshops and specified requirements covering business, functional and infrastructure aspects. These were visualised in the form of HMI concepts, use cases and other specification documents.We need to be highly flexible because user requirements change as market conditions and the tool as such evolve.

11. explore

12. Two iterations of the Polaris Offtake arbitration module Prototyping The design of the HMI was integrated with the functional analysis to create an explicit link, between, for example, display panels in the HMI and system operations and security settings in the analysis.

13. define

14. Engineering specifications We captured all details of the POLARIS HMI in specifications for each module. Individual HMI elements and actions were listed with their respective references to the underlying data model. Separate specifications covered generically applicable HMI patterns, access rights, graphs & behaviour and colour settings. Disabled for nomination agent, reader Disabled for observer Example from the POLARIS UI access rights specification

15. Summary The intensive collaboration with Fluxys in an agile development process has integrated our HMI design effort in the full cycle of business analysis, requirements specification, functional analysis, development and testing. We integrated our design efforts via two parallel design tracks: one to shape longer-term concepts, and one to deliver detailed HMI design in a three-months cycle.

16. Outcome Namahn designed the HMI for an application that retrieves, manages and displays vast amounts of flow planning data from other applications. Using the tool, Flow Engineers at Fluxys can monitor and update gas flow information in real-time without interrupting their workflow. Fluxys has secured a high acceptance of the product and continues to involve our designers for further iterations as well as for developing new document templates, design and modeling guidelines and training modules to support its IT analysts and developers

17. Tom Stevens ts@namahn.com +32 486 250 372