The period after an equipment trip or shutdown is one of the most stressful and challenging times for operators. Part of the challenge stems from alarm floods; when the operator gets more alarms than they can respond to. If unabated, alarm floods can lead to a loss of situation awareness, the missing of alarms, operator error, or an incident. Alarm floods are one of the hardest alarm management issues to solve.
This presentation will discuss how you can eliminate alarm floods by designing and implementing alarm flood suppression logic in the control system. It will cover the best practices for design and implementation from ISA-18.2 / IEC 62682. It will show how to implement alarm flood suppression automatically in a DeltaV system using SILAlarm and pre-defined control modules. It will also show examples of how suppression can be implemented in Siemens PCS 7, Rockwell PlantPAx, and Yokogawa Centum systems.
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.