News & Events.
Managing Alarms Using Rationalization Article in Control Engineering
March 29, 2011
exida Director of Alarm Management Todd Stauffer co-authored an article entitled When It’s Easy To Implement Alarms, Too Many Often Make The List. Alarm Rationalization Helps You Control And Optimize The Selection. The article will be the cover story for the March issue of Control Engineering.
We’ve seen it before: poorly designed alarm systems have caused operators to miss critical alarms or to respond incorrectly, leading to unplanned shutdowns, reduced product quality, damaged assets, or worse. Reductions in operating staff and the corresponding increase in process responsibility for each operator (more loops per operator) have contributed to these issues.
The biggest culprit, however, has been the application of technology in modern control systems. In the days of hardwired controls and alarms (the “good old days” to some), engineers had to justify the need for each alarm that went on the panel because there was a real cost of around $1,000 per alarm and limited space on the panel. Since modern control systems come pre-engineered with alarm conditions galore, alarms are now often mistakenly considered free. There is, therefore, little or no incentive to justify alarms or minimize their number. No one wants to be blamed for not providing an alarm, so many are motivated to enable all of the alarm conditions provided by the system. As shown in Figure 1 below, this has led to alarm overload in the control room, nuisance alarms, alarm floods, and incorrectly prioritized alarms, all of which diminish the operator’s effectiveness.