How do you update and maintain HMI screens throughout their lifecycle?

Before the design phase, a well developed style guide should be created outlining the HMI design approach for the system. The style guide should consider modularity and standardization with the goal of long term maintenance and future upgradability in mind.

One can grab a main page and work as a template for button size, numeric display, font, font size, naming convention, color.

HMIs should be designed for ongoing development and change. In my experience with 90s-era HMIs, often created by automation engineers or PLC programmers, scalability and user-centered design were not priorities. Modern practices, however, emphasize the importance of following design systems and guidelines. Creating reusable components is crucial for system maintenance and upgrades. While low-code platforms are useful, relying solely on them might not meet all specific needs or scenarios. A balanced approach, considering both user needs and technical scalability, is essential for effective HMI design.

You might want to calibrate HMI screen if the screen has a touch issue. Make a test kit that has a power supply, plc, input, output and HMI screen.

Make sure to note a change, a version control. Always archive the latest project. Save the project name with a date. Organize the files, images, do they are not duplicated.

Monitoring and optimizing HMI screens involve continuous assessment of their performance, availability, and reliability. While real-time testing in an industrial environment offers insights, it may not fully capture the system's effectiveness or usability. High-stakes environments also limit the feasibility of real-time debugging. In my experience, usability testing and A/B testing are more effective. These methods align the design with the operator's mental model and help reduce cognitive load, ensuring the HMI is both efficient and user-friendly.

You might want to use better HMI that has better performance. Some HMI can handle 25 plus number of screen pages. Use the logo, image files as a bitmap that could help save some memory.

The screen should simple and easy to use. Make a step by step instruction manual on how to assemble electro-mechanical parts, assembly, and how they are controlled using HMI screen.

Early documentation to feed the design needs to be included as an additional section. An HMI design standards, and a system specific HMI Style Guide should be developed prior to the design phase to ensure consistent display development, and to communicate requirements to third party integrators if involved. I think it is acceptable to adopt a RAGAGEP standard such as IAS-101 as a site standard rather than developing your own, then developing a style guide for each system that outlines in detail how you will apply that standard to each HMI platform.

These articles are a bit basic, they don't offer any real insight. Furthermore, they are basically parroting the ideas of the consensus standards with very minimal detail. Deep dives into specific topics might be a little more insightful, but as of now, I don't see how AI will generate good insight beyond what is available for it to read from the consensus standards. Engineers should look to the consensus standards to guide their design efforts, for deeper insight, they will need to rely on a combination of their intuition, advice from peers, prior experience, end user feedback, and possibly articles written by peers. I am struggling to see the value of this article.