Towards Web Services Oriented Unified Supervisory HCI

Transcription

1 University A. Mira of Bejaia From the SelectedWorks of Dr. Djilali IDOUGHI 2007 Towards Web Services Oriented Unified Supervisory HCI Djilali IDOUGHI Christophe Kolski Available at:

2 Towards Web Services Oriented Unified Supervisory HCI Djilali Idoughi 1,2 and Christophe Kolski 2 1 University Abderrahmane. Mira, Targa Ouzemmour, Béjaia, 06000, Algeria imtiagetec@yahoo.co.uk 2 LAMIH-UMR CNRS 8530, University of valenciennes and Hainaut Cambrésis, Le Mont Houy, 59313, Valenciennes cedex 9, France. christophe.kolski@univ-valenciennes.fr Abstract. A lot of work & research has been done in HCI supervision-type industrial context, but mostly relative to control rooms and local supervision. However, many multi-site or extended and complex organisations are faced with some new challenges and trends such as supervisory systems integration and unified access of the different actors which have not been much considered so far. A service oriented solution is outlined and explained in the context of industrial supervision oriented towards to a unified and integrated supervisory HCI design. A representative supervisory scenario taken from a real case study which illustrates the approach is then described. Keywords: HCI, supervision, service oriented approach, web services, operators, service integration, composite applications, unified access. 1 Introduction Every enterprise is characterized by its core business and four resources types: human resources with their knowledge and competencies, the information it manipulates to take decisions and pilot its activities, the relationship it has with its ecosystem (partners, suppliers, customers) and the processes that rule its functioning mode [1]. In an extended enterprise, decisions involve multiple actors with different views on the overall underlying system. One of the major ergonomic and HCI challenges is to provide the involved actors with presentation and visualizations that fit their view on the system in order to support the complex decision making processes in a safer, flexible manner [2]. Moreover, the enterprises acquire and store huge volumes of data from multiple sources such as financial services, human resources, client relationship management, supply chains, and so on. At the plant floor level, this may concern supervisory control and data acquisition, human-computer interfaces, programmable logic controllers, process databases, manufacturing execution systems. In general, their underlying systems are designed separately and independently, so their HCI too. Therefore, the need of supervisory systems integration is to go beyond a restrained perimeter of the supervisory application towards the perimeter of the entire organization connecting it to other vertical applications in order to exchange relevant J. Jacko (Ed.): Human-Computer Interaction, Part IV, HCII 2007, LNCS 4553, pp , Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007

3 Towards Web Services Oriented Unified Supervisory HCI 917 Partners Suppliers Customers Enterprise supervisory HCI Supervisory operators Other employees Fig. 1. Integrated supervisory HCI global view and pertinent information between customers, suppliers, partners, processes and employees (figure 1). A unified user interface would be a mean that enables any human operator with any device and from everywhere to be recognized, identified and have immediate access to all pertinent information that should be presented in a personalized format. This also allows the ability to interact with other correspondent systems. The human operators should have at their disposal a number of resources and tools that may help them in performing their supervisory tasks which become highly cognitive due to the high computerization and automatization. The main challenge is how to provide the wide variety of involved actors with visualizations that fit their view on the process, their knowledge, their expertise and their information needs, therefore, hiding all the complexity and the heterogeneity of the various systems they are working on. In this paper, we propose one solution to dealing with these complex and illstructured problems. Our proposal is to apply the service oriented approach [3] as a mean to designing and developing a suitable HCI accessible and understandable to the involved actors. These actors can be operators inside the control room, on the field or on the plant floor. They can also be outside the supervision site such as nomadic operators, process experts, shift operators, etc. They can be collaborators, suppliers, partners and customers of the organization. Important issues of the service oriented approach such as technical and ergonomic as well as mobility have been already tackled by the authors [4, 5]. As application, we are currently developing and testing a mockup of the supervisory user interface of a sugar refinery system within an agro-alimentary organization in a complex and evolving environment. 2 Service Oriented HCI This section presents some basic concepts and requirements of a service oriented design approach that can be realized by web services and their underlying technologies. 2.1 The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Approach It is a software development approach which consists of decomposing the software into simple, reusable, and interoperable services, addressing specific business process

4 918 D. Idoughi and C. Kolski needs. It delivers business functionalities as a set or panel of services that can be deployed separately or grouped in order to meet or satisfy a great number of business needs with a minimum cost and in a reasonable delay. The application logic contained in the various systems across the organization are exposed as web services that can be integrated at the application level as well as at the user interface level using portal technologies such as WSRP (see below). A web service is a software component representing specific set of business functions that can be described, published and invoked over the internet using XMLbased standards such as SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. SOA based applications are composite applications which draw on existing data and services in order to build unique, new functionality that can deliver business value to a company in a flexible deployment mode that includes desktop, mobile, rich client and other interfaces [6]. 2.2 SOA Development Requirements In order to apply the SOA approach to HCI application development, there are some important design requirements that have to be considered such as: process integration to business partners from organization, sharing of information, business agility, IT productivity, abstraction of complex business logic, application integration into reusable web services. The creation of new business logic, user interfaces that extend the value of legacy applications, rapidly developing highly functional composite applications, multi-channel deployment of composite applications are the major objectives to achieve. We present some relevant design and implementation issues of the future unified supervisory HCI with enhanced features that will tailor to end users needs using the concept of service oriented architecture. 3 Design Issues of the Unified Supervisory HCI The unified supervisory HCI should meet the following supervisory functionalities: uniqueness user access, personalization (user profiles) and customization, single sign on, security, content management and presentation, content publication, information search, application integration, contextual aids (the user should have at any time all the aids relative to a current task), notification (the user may define indicators and be alerted in case of their evolution, the information is then pushed towards the user by different means: SMS, , etc.), role (group users with same access privileges to supervisory functionalities and information: user, super user, administrator, decision makers, process experts, etc.). Other actors (i.e. operators) may be provided with personalized information depending on time, place, task and their current role. This refers to context aware services [7; 5]. Data from different sources needs (plant floor, different information systems) may be combined into an integral view on the system; therefore information visualization should be appropriate and user oriented.

5 Towards Web Services Oriented Unified Supervisory HCI 919 All these functionalities are tied to the user satisfaction and acceptation of the user interface. The HCI designed functionalities are provided as supervisory and organizational services to the user to interact with and can be implemented as services such as portlets (see below). 4 Implementation Issues The HCI model corresponding to supervisory functionalities that should be considered during the design phase (design issues) would include a scheme for the aggregation and integration of a set of portions or sections of web pages implemented as portlets into a unified user interface implemented as a portal [8]. It consists of a set of administrative functions that allow authorized users to define the content hierarchy (pages, peer pages, nested pages, etc.), the page content layout and the binding of incorporated portlets to specific sections of the page that can be viewed and modified by some authorized and identified users. Portals are Web-based integrated and personalized applications that provide the end user with a single point of access to a wide variety of aggregated content anytime and from anywhere using any Web-enabled client device [9]. These applications are developed using Web application technology such as web services [10]. A portlet is an independently developed, deployed, managed and displayed Web application that underlies a window within a portal Web page [9], were multiple portlets can coexist and be easily customized based on their role within the portal model, can work together to help users to accomplish a given task, and be properly rendered for a variety of user devices as well. [11; 12; 13] define Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) are visual, user-facing web services centric components that plug-n-play with portals or other intermediary web applications that aggregate content or applications from different sources and visualized in an adaptable way. This refers to HCI adaptation [5]. After explanations concerning design issues of the unified supervisory HCI, we will describe the case study with a UML modeled representative scenario; mock-ups concerning the unified supervisory HCI will be also showed. 5 Case Study: Potential Integrated and Unified HCI for a Complex Sugar Refinery The company concerned by this case study is a multi site organization with independent remote and heterogeneous communicating information systems and different human actors. We have studied potential HCI aspects of a real sugar production site which consist of ten processing sections being supervised (figure 2). The analysis of the supervisory overall work situation or context has allowed identifying different needs, principal flows, different use cases, different actors implied and services deployed. For the detailed study, we may refer to [14].

6 920 D. Idoughi and C. Kolski Sugar silos Shipping Section 9. Utilities Sugar production site Section 1. Refining-remelting Section 2. Carbonatation Section 3. Filtration Section 4. Decoloration Section 5. Decoloration Section 6. HP cristallisation Section 8. BP cristallisation Section 10. Conditionning Section 7. Drying Water, co 2, steam Sugar Transport Trucks Sales & delivery Fig. 2. Sugar production site global view 5.1 Scenario Description The scenario considered is extracted from the figure 2. In this scenario, the aim is to imply as many as possible of the actors of the organisation as well as those who are partners, suppliers and customers (figure 1). The scenario is summarized as follows: 1. The brown sugar is shipped and delivered by the foreign supplier and stocked in sugar silos of the company. 2. The laboratory of the company proceeds to some analysis of a brown sugar sample taken from the silos before the beginning of the production cycle: a. A laboratory technician analyses the sample, prepares, edits and transmits the results to the laboratory coordinator via the supervisory HCI of the company on his/her notebook. b. The laboratory coordinator visualizes, studies and validates the results, then transmits them to the supervisor in chief in the control room in order to engage the brown sugar refinery process. All the detailed information of the analysis is transmitted and can be visualized in different formats by different authorized operators with particular profiles in the laboratory and control room. 3. In control room a. The supervisor in chief informs all the relevant operators in charge of the process over all the ten sections (figure 2) to engage a new cycle of production. b. The supervisor in chief can administer and visualize all the mimic display of all the sections. c. A particular profile of operators can only access and visualize a particular section such as the carbo-filter operator with section 2.

7 Towards Web Services Oriented Unified Supervisory HCI During the refining process a. On request of the laboratory coordinator, a field operator in section 2 proceeds to the analysis of a sugar sample in transformation; the results are transmitted to the laboratory in order to check the current status of the transformed product. b. The results are also made available to the control room operators. c. Information exchange and communication (interaction) via the HCI is then engaged between the operators in control room and the operators in the laboratory. d. Depending on the results, the supervisor in chief decides to take or not some relevant and adequate actions. 5. We assume that these analyses were made just before the shift team takes place. Therefore, the authorized shift operators taking place have the possibility to access and visualize some of the relevant and pertinent information of the results. 6. Now, assuming that the sugar refinement process has gone to its end, which is to the conditioning section (section 10) from where it can be either directly delivered and shipped to customers or stocked in warehouse. All the necessary information emanating from this section is also managed via the HCI application of the company. 7. Sales & delivery a. Via the company HCI application, registered and authorized customers access and place orders, see the order status and delivery. b. The sales manager interacts with authorized customers in preparing and editing sales contracts. Therefore, they can have access to the same view of document or information. c. The sales manager and the warehouse manager can also interact and have access or share a same view of relevant and pertinent information. 8. At the management level a. The general manager can have access and visualize all relevant and pertinent management information such dashboards, reporting, etc. b. The general manager can also share and access some relevant information with some authorized partners and shareholders. 5.2 Representative Use Cases and Mock-Ups The figure 3 presents some representative use cases of the scenario. These use cases focus on the operators present in the laboratory and the control room. These various operators have to interact between them. The figure 4 presents the use case implying actors at the management level of the organisation; they are in interaction with other external actors of the organisation (for example partners, shareholders).

8 922 D. Idoughi and C. Kolski Laboratory technician Laboratory coordinator Analysis of the physical-chemical characteristics of brown sugar sample Requests sample prelevement & analysis in section 2 Analysis of a transformed sugar sample & results transmission to the laboratory and control room field operator profile in section2 Shift operator Laboratory coordinatorassistant Prepare, edit and transmit an analysis bulletin and report Administer & visualize all mimic displays of all sections Supervisor in chief Inform relevant operators in charge of the process Operator in control room Visualize & access all mimic displays of all sections Visualize & access only specific mimic displays Particular profile of operators Fig. 3. Major use cases in the laboratory & in control room General manager Administer & visualise all relevant & pertinent management information visualize & access some authorized information Authorized partners Fig. 4. Major use cases Management level Before illustrating the scenario on a HCI mock-up, we will highlight hereafter, the links which exist between use cases, tasks, sub-tasks and web services. A business process seen from a user perspective can be modelized with use cases. Therefore, it can be modelized as high level abstracted web services. This is a composed service. The business process is decomposed into several tasks (human and automatic), to be modelized as web services. Moreover, in decomposing the high level abstracted tasks into sub-tasks, they can be modelized as fine grained web services. However, the high level abstracted business processes or tasks can be modelized as coarse grained web services. It is a service composition or aggregation. In this scenario we show only the need or application of service approach but without giving any implementation or realisation detail.

9 Towards Web Services Oriented Unified Supervisory HCI 923 Fig. 5. Different unified supervisory HCI views Therefore, from the use cases in the figures 3 and 4, we show the necessary web services. The figure 5 illustrates screen pages mock-ups corresponding to those web services. 6 Conclusion and Future Work This paper has presented a service oriented and web-based HCI design approach aimed to achieving the information and legacy systems integration requirement, unifying the view of federated different supervisory HCI, providing a seamless access to supervisory services and remote supervisory resources through user friendly interfaces. Some HCI design as well as implementation issues were

10 924 D. Idoughi and C. Kolski presented. A real case study of the supervisory user interface of sugar refinery of an extended agro-alimentary undertaken has been given. A mockup of some HCI scenarios were shown. As a future work, we plan to validate all the mockups of the supervisory HCI exploiting portal technology under a commercial platform development. Acknowledgements. The authors thank the Région Nord-Pas de Calais and the FEDER (TAC MIAOU and EUCUE Projects, TAT SART Project) for their financial support. References 1. Microsoft corp. White paper: Service orientation and its role in your connected systems strategy (2004) Accessible at: 2. Chin, R.T.H., van Houten, S.-P.A., Verbraeck, A.: Towards a simulation and visualization portal to support multi-actor decision making in mainports. In: Kuhl, M. E., Steiger, N. M., Armstrong, F. B., Joines, J. A. (eds.), Proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference, (December 4-7, 2005) 3. De Gamma.: White paper: Enabling service oriented Architecture (2003). Accessible at 4. Idoughi, D., Kolski, C.: Approches orientées services web de l IHM de supervision: nouvelles solutions technologiques pour les ingénieurs et nouvelles problématiques pour les ergonomes. In: Proceedings ErgoIA 2006, L humain comme facteur de performance des systèmes complexes (Biarritz, France, October 2006), ESTIA & ESTIA. Innovation, Biarritz, pp , (2006) ISBN Idoughi, D., Kolski, C.: Towards new Web Services based Supervisory Systems dedicated to Nomadic Operators. In: Proceedings of the 25th Edition of EAM 06, European Annual Conference on Human Decision-Making and Manual Control September 27-29, 2006, Valenciennes, France, Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes (2006) ISBN Greenbaum, J.: Return on Investment for Composite Applications and Service Oriented Architectures, A Model for Financial Success and Enterprise Efficiency. Report, Enterprise Applications Consulting (2005) Accessible at: 7. Coutaz, J., Crowley, J.L., Dobson, S., Garlan, D.: Context is key. Communications of the ACM 48, (2005) 8. Will, R., Ramaswamy, S., Schaeck, T.: WebSphere Portal: Unified user access to content, applications and services (2004) Accessible at: 9. Bajwa, H.: Testing Process for Portal Applications. Master science thesis, Department Of Computer Science, Calgary, Alberta (December 2005) 10. Web Services Activity. W3C. Accessible at : Schaeck, T., Thompson, R.: Enabling Interactive, Presentation-Oriented Content Services Through the WSRP Standard. Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) (2003) Accessible at:

11 Towards Web Services Oriented Unified Supervisory HCI Diaz, A.L., Fischer, P., Leue, C., Schaeck, T.: Web Services for Remote Portals (2002) Accessible at: Castle, B.: Introduction to Web Services for Remote Portlets, Use WSRP in a Service oriented Architecture (2005) Accessible at: Idoughi, D., Nouri, S., Foudad, K.: Etude & conception de l IHM de supervision utilisant les technologies du web : cas de la raffinerie du sucre de Cevital. Report, University Abderrahmane, Bejaia, Algeria (2006)