Control Room Design

A control room is a place where the operator has good situation awareness of the process that he is trying to control. We often get called in to refurbish control rooms that have been designed badly. Once a control room has been designed, it’s very hard to change it. You might have to live for 20 or 30 years with a bad design that’s not helping you. A bad design impacts the operator’s situation awareness, and accidents can happen.

If you want to design a control room to today’s best practices, you have to start by first of all doing some form of gap analysis. Understanding where you are against best practices. During the gap analysis we also must address security issues. We then move on to developing a vision for the control room for the next ten years. With that vision, we do a conceptual design.

Once we’ve achieved the conceptual design, we move on to the detail design. That’s where our architect comes in and actually gets us to the point where we can produce construction drawings for the development of the design. Once we’re to this point, we’ll have addressed all of the issues about room adjacencies, console adjacencies, control room lighting levels, what the temperature and humidity control should be, etc. All of that specification will go down for the builder to build the best control room that is ergonomic and meets today’s best practices.