It finally happened. Alarm management problems at the plant led to an incident and now management wants action. You have “volunteered” to put together a plan to execute alarm rationalization. You need to create a defendable estimate of how long rationalization will…
Todd Stauffer, Director of Alarm Management at exida, takes you through a key part of the Alarm Rationalization process called Alarm Objective Analysis (AOA).
You will learn how to determine what alarms you need (and which one’s you don’t), how to eliminate nuisance alarms, and safely reduce the number…
Successful alarm rationalization combines both art and science. From the scientific point of view, rationalization follows a systematic process that applies alarm management principles to determine whether an alarm is justified (needed) and to document its basis (cause, consequence, corrective action, time to respond) and settings (priority, setpoint) in…
From an operations point of view, one of the significant parts of the ISA-18.2 and IEC 62682 alarm management standards is the endorsement of alarm response procedures. An alarm response procedure, otherwise known as “Alarm Help” or “Alarm Response Manual”, is defined as guidance for response to an alarm (e.g., operator…
One of the more important tasks in the alarm management lifecycle is auditing of the alarm system configuration. Auditing preserves your investment in rationalization, checks for changes that bypassed the MOC process, and helps you to maintain the integrity of the alarm system. Oh, and it also required per…
US Chemical Safety Board cites lack of Alarm Philosophy, Alarm Rationalization, and State-Based Alarming as Contributing Factors to Blowout in Oklahoma
On January 22, 2018, a blowout and rig fire at the Pryor Trust gas well killed five workers, who were inside the…
As the name implies, the purpose of Safe Operating Limits (SOL) is to define the limits beyond which a process will not intentionally be operated and at which troubleshooting ceases, replaced by pre-determined actions to bring the process to a safe state. Pretty important information. I am sure this is…
Situation: There are three operator consoles (positions) in the same control room. There is one general alarm horn that goes off whenever a new alarm comes in from any one of the three consoles. The horn draws the attention of each of the three operators.
Question: How are the…
The alarm system is a daily encounter for most operations across different industries. For oil and gas, the alarm system alerts and reminds the operation to take action(s) to revert the process back to the normal operating range. For pharmaceuticals and batch operations, the alarm system can be used…
As many of you will know, one of the most common form of nuisance to operators working industrial controls are repeating or chattering alarms. On a typical plant, repeating alarms may account for around 50% of the alarm annunciations. They are a problem because the operator will have to…