Alarm Management was often neglected in the past until after installation and commissioning of the control system. This led to alarm overload, nuisance alarms, turning off of the alarm system, and some dangerous start-ups. It is no longer acceptable in today’s environment for many end users to start up without having applied alarm management best practices beforehand (e.g., EEMUA 191 and ISA-18.2). It is becoming increasingly common to perform alarm rationalization, a process for determining which alarms are valid / necessary and documenting their priority / limit / cause / consequence / corrective action, early in a project such as during FEED.
This webinar will present:
- A brief overview on the “state” of alarm management
- Discuss some of the challenges of applying alarm management to Greenfield projects when the process design (P&IDs), safety design (HAZOP, LOPA), and control system configuration are taking place in parallel
- Will highlight how to manage alarms when they are used as safeguards and layers of protection
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.