Development of an Alarm Philosophy document (APD) is one of the first and most important tasks in creating an effective alarm management program (and it is required by the ISA-18.2 and IEC 62682 standards). This webinar will discuss what topics should be addressed in an alarm philosophy (as required or recommended in the standards). It will also provide “tips and tricks” and “lessons learned” based on exida’s experience in the field and based on the ISA-18.2 Technical Report on Alarm Philosophy (which exida helped write). It will discuss which areas of the APD may depend on control system functionality and which areas are control system-agnostic. Specific examples will be covered such as prioritization, classification, use of Highly Managed Alarms, alarm suppression, and the use of alarm response procedures.
exida Recorded Webinars
The Philosophy Behind Effective Alarm Management
Recording Date: March 2020
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.