Suppressing Plant Alarms

by | Jul 31, 2019 | Control & Safety Systems

Jim Cahill

Jim Cahill

Chief Blogger, Social Marketing Leader

Since the early days of distributed control systems, much work has been done to improve alarm management and prevent alarms from flooding operators to prevent them from properly diagnosing and correcting abnormal situations. The ANSI/ISA 18.2 alarm management standard began development back in 2003 and built off of the work of other alarm management initiatives. It published as ANSI/ISA-18.2-2009 Management of Alarm Systems for the Process Industries (ISA-18.2) in 2009.

In a 2019 Ovation Users’ Group Conference presentation, Suppressing Alarms in Your Plant, Emerson’s Benjamin Poskie reviewed the ISA-18.2 standard and highlighted the alarm management functionality in the Ovation distributed control system that helps power, water and wastewater plants meet this standard. He discussed nuisance alarms and identifying & releasing suppressed alarms.

Two key performance metrics in the 18.2 standard are to have less than 10 standing alarms and less than 10 alarms in a 10-minute alarm flood for acceptable performance. Highlights of Ovation alarms include on-line parameter tuning, triple redundant alarm icons, suppression by design, manual suppression (shelving) and an alarm suppression log.

For nuisance alarms, chattering alarms are more than 4 that occur within 60 seconds. Adjusting the dead band, off-delay and alarm limit are ways to correct but make sure not to set the deadband into the long-term average value. Frequent alarms are more than 6 in 60 minutes and on-delays can help fix. Sensor alarms should not come to the operators unless they are part of a control strategy.

Redundant alarm suppression identification should have the analog transmitter with good quality suppressing the digital alarm. Other scenarios include first-out, x-out-of-y voting schemes, and eclipses escalating digital switches where the greater alarm replaces the lesser one.

Equipment off alarms suppress alarms when the equipment is not running due to control strategy or operator intervention. If shutdown for condition such as high vibration, alarm will not be suppressed.

Process mode alarms are operations during starting up, shutting down, and other change of state situations. Alarms are suppressed that don’t require action by the operator or are invalid for the state of operation.

Long-term standing are alarms that have remained around for a long time—days, weeks and longer. Make sure the deadband does not overlap the average value. Time constants are delays such as a low flow alarm on a pump starting up.

Ben summed up alarm management to establish philosophy based on ISA 18.2, rationalize and document alarms, use analog alarm limits, leverage Ovation integrated functionality, and understand user sensory & cognitive boundaries

He switched discussion points to describe AgileOps alarm management software which was developed by Prosys, who was acquired by Emerson. AgileOps provides alarm management to improve control and operator performance. It is a software suite including EventKPI Reporting, Master Alarm Database, Shelving (list management), and Dynamic Management.

Visit the Ovation Alarm Management section on Emerson.com for more on the tools and services to help you improve operator performance through improved alarm management.

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The opinions expressed here are the personal opinions of the authors. Content published here is not read or approved by Emerson before it is posted and does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Emerson.

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