Plant Alarm Management and Analysis

by | Jul 3, 2013 | Control & Safety Systems

Jim Cahill

Jim Cahill

Chief Blogger, Social Marketing Leader

It’s almost like a Friday here in the US as we head into the 4th of July Independence Day weekend. Let’s end the short week with a YouTube video on alarm management by Emerson’s Kim VanCamp.

In the 8:25 YouTube video, DeltaV Analyze, Kim opens by describing the importance of managing plant alarms and the 2009 ratified alarm management standard, ANSI/ISA 18.2. The key measure for how well a plant manages its alarm is the incoming alarm rate, defined as alarms per 10-minute increments.

At 0:59 in the video, he shows how the typical plant’s performance lags the 18.2 standard as well as the EEMUA 191 best practices. The standard also addresses what constitutes a “good” alarm—one that alerts operators for an abnormal condition and be a condition that requires the operators to act. Alarms that do not satisfy both these criteria are nuisance alarms.

At a little over 2 minutes into the video, Kim shows how the DeltaV Analyze software application can help to improve alarm management. It provides continuous alarm system performance monitoring to help identify problem alarms and performance versus benchmarks such as the 18.2 standard.

In his demonstration, Kim shows how to drill down by plant area and/or timeframe to analyze the source of problems. Reporting is available to share key performance indicators and overall alarm performance over a shift, a day, or other configurable time frame.

The Wikipedia page on alarm management also provides a very nice background and links to additional references to help you in your alarm management improvement process.

Update: Kim reminds me to make sure you know about the Alarm Help video too.

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