Alarm Management: Getting the Most Out of your Yokogawa Control System
Recording Date: April 2021
Yokogawa has a long and rich history of “firsts” in the world of distributed control systems (DCS). They were one of the first suppliers to include alarm shelving, for example, long before it became required alarm management functionality per the ISA-18.2 / IEC 62682 standards. Despite this, many Yokogawa users don’t leverage the alarm management capabilities that are available to them. The purpose of this presentation is to discuss alarm management tools and capabilities that can be used to comply with the ISA-18.2 / IEC 62682 alarm management lifecycle, to reduce unwanted shutdowns (trips), reduce risk, and improve operator effectiveness. Highlights include discussion of how to analyze alarm system performance, perform rationalization, use eclipsing, alarm shelving, load shedding, alarm flood suppression, and present “Alarm Help” to the operator (alarm response procedures). Examples will be shown from CAMS, SILAlarm, exaquantum ARA and AMD, exapilot, and exaplog.
About the Presenter:
Todd Stauffer
Todd Stauffer, PE, is responsible for exida’s alarm management products and services (training, consulting, SILAlarm™ rationalization software). He has been an editor and voting member of the ISA-18.2 standards committee on alarm management since 2005. He was an active participant in the development / publication of the ISA-18.2 standard itself and as an editor / reviewer for ISA’s series of technical reports on alarm management (including ISA-18.2 TR1 “Alarm Philosophy” and TR3 “Basic Alarm Design” for which he served as co-chair). He is currently the co-chair of the joint working group developing ISA-84.91.03 “Functional Safety of Safety Controls, Alarms, and Interlocks for the Process Sector”. Todd is an instructor for ISA’s official training class on alarm management and is exida’s representative on the EEMUA 191 committee.
He has executed numerous alarm philosophy workshops, gap assessments, and alarm management training classes for different control system platforms. Todd developed exida’s alarm philosophy best practices template. He is also the product manager for the SILAlarm rationalization software tool. Todd is an industry thought leader in alarm management. He has published numerous articles and presented many papers at supplier user group and industry conferences. His presentations have garnered three “Best in Conference” nominations and his article “Don’t be Alarmed: Avoid Unplanned downtime from alarm overload“ was selected as Intech magazine’s best article of the year in 2007.