Learning gets real for industrial customers with Honeywell mixed reality simulation

When industrial technology giant Honeywell analyzed industry trends, it saw a way to circumvent a serious problem. As much as 50 percent of today’s manufacturing workforce is expected to retire in the next five years in the oil and gas and other asset-intensive industries. What’s more, the incoming millennial workforce must find its feet in a radically different age than their predecessors. The technology company knew its customers would be hard-pressed to maintain a skilled industrial staff. Honeywell drew on Microsoft Azure technology and Microsoft HoloLens, the world’s first self-contained holographic computer, to create Honeywell Connected Plant Skills and Safety Immersive Competency for its customers, an immersive industrial learning solution that plays to how humans best learn.

Seeing the curves ahead

Industrial plant control rooms all over the world have deployed thousands of Honeywell’s C300 controllers, which provide process control for the Experion® Process Knowledge System (PKS) platform. Many of them are being used in oil and gas facilities, but also in the pharmaceuticals, chemicals, refining, and pulp and paper industries. Controllers are mission critical in running a multitude of equipment types, from compressors and pumps to heat exchangers and reactors, coordinating thousands of pieces of equipment at once. But the Honeywell customers’ skilled staff maintaining those devices have started to retire in record numbers. Training their replacements is time-consuming. It takes a bare minimum of a year of combined classroom and on-the-job training to be effective in even the most junior positions, given current methods. Ongoing training will punctuate the careers of these workers. Furthermore, millennial workers on average only stay in their jobs for two years, a different paradigm from their predecessors. Attracting capable young workers these days is tough. Manufacturing careers can be a hard sell to this tech-centric generation.

When Vincent Higgins, Director of Technology and Innovation at Honeywell Connected Plant, considered how learning happens, he saw a chasm between the efficacy of passive versus hands-on training. With Honeywell customers scattered around the globe, putting skilled trainers face-to-face with workers is expensive. Using Higgins’s observations as a springboard and working closely with customers to gather feedback, the Honeywell engineering team used Azure to create Honeywell Connected Plant Skills and Safety Immersive Competency, a learning technology that uses HoloLens for hands-on training. The devices and training simulation application will be available to customers for ongoing employee training.

Crafting the future

Wearing a HoloLens device, trainees can move through a physical space safely—because they can still see the surrounding world—while simultaneously working with a virtual 3D simulation model. In addition to the obvious benefits of reducing both travel costs and productive time lost for trainees, the mixed reality solution will extend beyond the traditional classroom and other remote training methods to provide more effective training. “With Immersive Competency, technicians can easily take a new or refresher training in a safe environment just before doing a procedure,” says Higgins. “For a critical task that might only be done every two or three years, this focused training model is ideal.”

Once Honeywell customers acquire HoloLens devices and sign up for the program, training new staff is simply a matter of scheduling. Without elaborate planning and travel expenses, employees will have access to cloud-delivered training that is highly effective, inexpensive, and—for the next generation—engaging and cool.

Skill retention increases, too, according to Honeywell Senior Principal Systems Engineer Mark Phillips, who tested the solution to better understand the customer experience. “After using the solution to practice the lessons for controlling our new ultrasonic skid simulator for a demo, I realized that I knew every step,” says Phillips. “Using your hands to actually go through the actions, with authentic sights and sounds, reinforces learning far beyond the experience of reading a manual or watching a video.”

Backing mixed reality with hardworking Azure technology

Phillips’s team found encompassing development tools in Azure Service Fabric and Azure Lab Services to easily build, deploy, and manage the Immersive Competency solution. To create an integrated and realistic learning experience, the team had to incorporate legacy control room software into the solution and find the most seamless way to move to the cloud so that the system would be available on demand for Honeywell customers. The team used Lab Services to create an infrastructure that afforded maximum control over the life cycle of the virtual machines (VMs) where that legacy software resided, facilitating development and minimizing costs for customers. A range of interoperable Azure resources guide communication between components and host web APIs, including Lab Services, to host the VMs where the Experion software resides. Experion interacts with the virtual devices to complete the operator experience. Immersive Competency headsets leverage HoloLens to visualize the shadow devices that are running in the Service Fabric cluster, providing virtual devices on demand. What’s more, building and operating the solution using Service Fabric and Lab Services allows Honeywell’s HoloLens solution to be continuously improved and adapted over time. “With Azure, we have the scalability, reliability, and globally distributed platform we need to create a complete solution,” says Phillips. “Without Service Fabric and Lab Services, we’d have to spend significant time and resources managing the infrastructure.”

Honeywell draws on the efficiencies afforded by Azure to contain costs, providing Immersive Competency customers with the most cost-effective solution possible. “With Azure dynamic scaling features, we can scale the Immersive Competency infrastructure to match demand,” says Phillips. “So we’re able to run a lean system during low usage times and scale up dynamically with demand. It makes a big difference to cost control.”

The globally dispersed engineering team used Azure resource groups while developing the solution. “Using resource groups in Azure makes it easy to partition development and test groups,” says Phillips. “Different people can work on their respective versions and areas of the code without interfering with others. If we hadn’t taken advantage of Azure services, this project would have taken us much longer.” The team looks forward to seeing it expand beyond the oil and gas industry, says Phillips. “We’re proud of our solution. It’s highly scalable and will be very easy to deploy and manage.”

Find out more about Honeywell on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.