Industry Benchmark Survey on Alarms as Safeguards and Independent Protection Layers (IPLs)

exida recently conducted an industry benchmark survey on the practices for the use of alarms as safeguards and IPLs. With over 200 safety practitioners from around the world providing responses, you can use the survey findings to compare your practices and experiences to your peers and those defined as industry’s best. The full report is now available as a published work that exida presented at the 9th Global Congress on Process Safety.

One of the many areas of focus that was presented in the survey was risk reduction. Have you ever wondered whether you take too much or too little risk reduction for an operator response to an alarm? As shown in Figure 1, 10% of the respondents take an extremely conservative approach taking no risk reduction at all (a 1.0 risk reduction factor).  Approximately 35% of the respondents take a risk reduction of > 1.0 and ≤ 9.9, which could also indicate that they use a quantitative technique for layer of protection analysis (LOPA).  A risk reduction factor (RRF) of 10.0 is typically taken by 43% of the respondents. This RRF corresponds to what is most commonly cited in industry guidelines and recommendations.

The paper presents the survey results and discusses how they compare to best practices for alarm management (taken from the ISA-18.2) and process safety (taken from CCPS guidebooks and IEC 61511). If you would like to view the complete paper, click here.

Also, if you would like to learn more on this topic, or to understand the full detailed report, please register to attend next week’s webinar.