Are your operators overloaded with alarms or do they ignore nuisance alarms? Do you want to improve your alarm management practices, but don’t know where to start? This presentation discusses how to create an effective and sustainable program using the alarm management lifecycle of the IEC 62682 / ISA-18.2 standards. This unique seven-step process can be applied to brownfield and greenfield applications, independent of control system platform. It includes steps for benchmarking initial performance and identifying systematic issues, developing an alarm philosophy, performing alarming rationalization and implementing the results, creating alarm response procedures, applying advanced alarming techniques, measuring ongoing performance, and performing audits to ensure system integrity.
The presentation will show how following the program will allow you to address common alarm management issues (alarm overload, nuisance alarms, alarm floods, incorrectly prioritized alarms) and create a control room environment that maximizes operator performance, improves process safety, and drives operational discipline. Examples will be taken from multiple control system platforms including Emerson DeltaV, Rockwell PlantPAx, Honeywell Experion, Yokogawa Centum, and Siemens PCS 7.
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.