Partnership for improved visibility and control in demanding environments: SafeHMI – Powered by IconTrust® enhances operational and display safety across the process industry and railway sector.
HIMA, the world’s leading provider of safety-related automation solutions, has partnered with DEUTA, an expert in certified display and safety technology, to introduce SafeHMI — a new solution that combines HIMA’s safety systems and function block libraries with DEUTA’s safety-certified human-machine interface (HMI) panels powered by IconTrust technology.
This innovative solution sets new benchmarks for safety-related visualisation by delivering context-sensitive alarm management, secure operational functionality and display monitoring to SIL 3 standards (IEC 61508). It has been designed from the ground up to meet the strict requirements of functional safety.
Traditional SCADA systems and MIMIC panels often encounter limitations in safety-critical environments. SafeHMI overcomes these by providing operators with clear, prioritised information precisely when and where it is needed.
“With DEUTA, we have a technology partner with decades of experience in the field of safety-related displays, especially in the rail and transport sectors,” said Jörg de la Motte, CEO of the HIMA Group. “With SafeHMI, we are creating a solution that makes functional safety in the industrial environment visible, controllable and digitally manageable.”
Dynamic alarm display and secure operation
At the centre of the system is its dynamic alarm display, designed to reduce operator workload during fault conditions. The system automatically prioritises relevant alarms and provides concise, actionable instructions, limiting on-screen entries to a maximum of four at a time. This ensures clarity and focus, even in critical moments, helping to prevent operational errors.
Inputs, acknowledgements and safety overrides can be carried out directly via the touch panel, all tested, documented and validated to SIL 2/3 standards. This allows maintenance tasks or recipe adjustments to be executed digitally while maintaining a fully auditable record. Bernd Schäfer, Product Manager at HIMA, said: “With SafeHMI, we are taking display and operating logic to a new level of safety. In critical situations, operators not only receive information, but also clear instructions for action and they can rely on what they see being accurate.”
Reliability through IconTrust technology
A cornerstone of the system is DEUTA’s IconTrust technology, which continuously monitors screen output and identifies any discrepancies between displayed and expected values. This transforms the display into an active safety component certified up to SIL 3, ensuring maximum operational reliability and user confidence.
Seamless integration with the HIMA Safety Platform
SafeHMI is fully compatible with the HIMA Safety Platform. Configuration, updates and expansions can be implemented using standardised function blocks drawn from a certified library. This makes SafeHMI a core element of HIMA’s #safetygoesdigital initiative, which aims to digitise the entire life cycle of safety-related systems and their components.
“In partnership with HIMA, we can now provide generic safety technology for operating and display units used in the railway sector with over 30,000 units for new fields of application for which no comparable solution has been available to date. In combination with the HIMA safety system, the application possibilities are almost limitless,” said Dr Rudolf Ganz, CEO of the DEUTA Group and DEUTA-WERKE.
