Alarm management: realising the value

The alarm system is the primary tool for identifying abnormal operations and helping plant personnel take timely, appropriate action to move the process back to operational targets. Effective alarm systems create effective operators; ineffective alarm systems pose a serious risk to safety, the environment and plant profitability.

The following is a summary of a paper by Matrikon on the structure of a successful alarm management project. The full article will be published in the February edition of What's New in Process Technology.

Introduction

Too often, alarm system effectiveness is undermined by poorly configured alarms, static alarm settings that can't adapt to dynamic plant conditions and a host of other nuisance alarms, resulting in alarm floods that overwhelm operators just when they need to focus on potentially serious problems. As a result, operators and engineers in the process control industry have become increasingly aware of the value alarm management solutions offer.

Fortunately, as these solutions become more common, our understanding of the factors that impact the success or failure of these projects has grown significantly.

Alarm management methodology

The overall structure of a successful alarm management project is fundamentally the same across industries, regardless of plant size:

1. Benchmark and evaluate current performance: This is also the time to identify your biggest alarm system problems and your biggest opportunities for improvement.
2. Develop an alarm philosophy document: This is a critical document that clearly outlines key concepts and governing rules (what constitutes an alarm, risk categorisation, etc), alarm priorities, alarm management project roles and responsibilities, change management procedures and the project goals, such as target alarm levels, priority distributions, etc.
3. Alarm rationalisation: Target and eliminate the top 20 to 30 bad actors to significantly reduce alarm levels and perform a complete alarm system configuration review.
4. Implementation: Re-configure control system to minimise nuisance alarms and give operators useful information to solve problems in a timely manner.
5. Continuous improvement: Monitor performance over the long term to identify new issues, target and eliminate bad actors as they arise and search for new opportunities to improve alarm system performance.
6. Maintenance: Integrate alarm management practices into plant workflow at various levels, including operations, engineering, maintenance and management.

The value of benchmarking

Benchmarking is the first and most critical step in any alarm management project, yet some plants attempt to improve their alarm systems without taking stock of what they're trying to improve.

Benchmarking plays a triple role in a successful alarm management project. First, it's essential to assess your current performance so you can set realistic performance targets. Second, by doing a benchmarking assessment, you can identify key opportunities for improvement and key pain points that need to be addressed. Finally, benchmarking makes it possible to precisely measure the success and ROI of your project by providing a baseline for comparison.

Why create an alarm philosophy document?

When benchmarking is complete and you know where you stand, you can begin to identify where you want your alarm management project to take you. The alarm philosophy document outlines key alarm management concepts, goals and roles and responsibilities of the personnel involved in the project.

In order to get consistent results, you have to create precise guidelines for performing alarm rationalisation. These guidelines should very clearly define the criteria you use to identify legitimate alarms (as opposed to messages or notifications that don't require operator intervention) and the criteria you'll use to set alarm priorities. These guidelines act as a corporate standard to guide your entire organisation's alarm management efforts.

The alarm philosophy document identifies who is responsible for each phase of the alarm management project and who is responsible for maintaining the improvements made.

Once you have created your alarm philosophy document, you can start rationalising your alarm system. The rationalisation stage includes prioritisation of alarms, validation of alarm parameters, evaluation of alarm organisation and functionality, evaluation of field equipment and process design, and documentation for the purpose of assessment, improvement and regulatory compliance.

Making the connection

The first order of business is to establish connectivity to relevant control systems. Each control system is different and the connection details must be weighed carefully.

Don't restrict connectivity options to legacy collection strategies. What worked in the past may no longer be the best option and may restrict your flexibility for future development. Also, try to avoid relying on software components that might become obsolete during future control upgrades.

In general, when implementing data collection, it's best to keep it simple. If the collection strategy becomes overly complex, then it will be hard to maintain and ultimately your entire alarm management strategy will suffer.

What data should you collect?

Alarm data is called 'alarm and event' data for a reason. Tracking operator actions in addition to alarms is a very effective way to identify control problems and automation opportunities, and to audit the effectiveness of your alarm strategy.

Also, examining the ratio of operator actions to system alarms can help to identify poor alarm strategies. The simple doctrine 'every alarm requires operator intervention' demands that this ratio must exceed one intervention per alarm, excluding acknowledgements.

Separate inhibited alarms

Many control systems continue to send alarms to the journals even though the alarms are not audible, since they have been disabled either by the operator or by supervisory software. Failure to separate this data creates an inaccurate picture of alarm system performance and may lead personnel to think the problem is worse than it is.

Don't forget the operator!

The panel operator is the most important person in all rationalisation meetings. They are the end user and a major contributor to your alarm optimisation efforts. If you exclude the panel operator from the rationalisation process, the project will fail.

Get the right software

An incorrect or incomplete technical infrastructure can cripple your alarm management efforts. Without automated punch-list generation, the implementation will be extremely time-consuming. Most importantly, without alarm and event archiving and analysis, focus will not be placed where it should be placed, so make sure you are archiving this data and have the tools to properly analyse it.

Specific questions to ask your vendor include:

• Does the solution provide an alarm and event historian that creates an audit trail to facilitate incident reviews, nuisance alarm analysis, alarm flood analysis and operator action analyses?
• Does the solution automatically calculate alarm-related KPIs as outlined in EEMUA #191 standard?
• Does the solution automate the management of change process and reconcile the DCS against the engineered alarm settings in the master alarm database?
• Does the solution provide an audit trail for all changes to DCS configurations?

Further, if operators don't have instant access to alarm causes and consequences, you'll only receive marginal benefits from your efforts.

Staged implementation

Implementation should be a staged activity. Making implementation too complicated will only ensure it never gets done. Recognising this will help plant personnel break the execution strategy into manageable steps. By making the strategy easier to implement, you allow operations to get used to the changes gradually, thus increasing your chance of success.

Continuous improvement and long-term maintenance

Continuous improvement initiatives are attempts to find new ways to reduce nuisance alarms and further optimise your alarm system. Maintenance initiatives, on the other hand, aim to prevent losing the benefits you've already achieved. These final two phases of the alarm management methodology have the same fundamental requirements.

Daily alarm analysis and reporting, coupled with long-term alarm monitoring, help you plan for, and adapt to, changing plant conditions and help diagnose the root causes of problems which occur.

Conclusion

Alarm management solutions can significantly improve plant safety, reliability, and profitability, but will only succeed if they are implemented properly and maintained by qualified personnel. If you follow the project methodology presented here, your alarm management project will generate significant ROI.