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Alarming Services Alarming Services

Are operators visually filtering out nuisance alarms as they operate?

Do they miss important alarms in an alarm flood?

Is this the safest approach?

Alarm System Management creates control rooms that are quiet, calm and manageable.

Where every alarm or sequence of alarms can be evaluated, understood and addressed in a timely manner.

Why is Alarm Improvement Challenging?

Improving alarms at a facility can be a time-consuming process that does not yield an easily quantifiable return.  Capital spent on alarm improvement does not immediately show in metrics like throughput or efficiency.  As a result, management is reluctant to spend money on alarm improvement. Organizations need to see the value in safety, risk reduction and fewer unplanned outages that results from alarm improvements.   

Local Management must commit resources and bear liability for the alarm changes. They prefer to avoid costs and liability, focusing on reliable plant operation. Poor alarming practices are seen as maintaining the status quo.

Upper Management wants industry-leading alarming  practices because it lowers the risk of an event with economic, health, environmental or criminal consequences. 

The parties are misaligned when upper management expects local management to take on the cost and liability without support. This leads to slow progress and frustration. Alignment is achieved when the parties define an acceptable level of risk from their alarms and plan to achieve this goal.

Alarming issues exist across systems and across disciplines.  Communication, collaboration and support from different disciplines (Operators, Instrumentation, Engineering, Electrical, Automation, IT and Plant Management) is required to identify and rationalize alarms and to work through the management of change process to implement changes. This level of collaboration is difficult to achieve without some form of alarm program or alarm improvement structure. 
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It takes time to identify, approve and implement alarming changes and additional time to quantify improvements to alarming metrics.  The extended duration and intermittent nature of the work causes resources committed to the project to lose interest or to get allocated elsewhere. 

The Value of Well Managed Alarms

When operators receive too many alarms they resort to visually screening the alarms for ones they recognize as needing an action. Most alarms are dismissed by acknowledging and taking no action. This strategy breaks down when many unrecognized alarms appear, an alarm flood occurs, or an unexperienced operator takes control. In these cases, the operator can’t keep up and critical alarms are missed, situations are incorrectly diagnosed, and the wrong actions are taken. The result is an unplanned outage. Well designed alarms are manageable even under stressful abnormal conditions and help to prevent unplanned shutdowns.

Operators have 5 responsibilities ordered below by importance:

  1. Keep the plant operating in a safe state
  2. Make production targets
  3. Operate efficiently (lowest cost per unit of product)
  4. Assist with reliability and maintenance
  5. Suggest ways to improve

Alarms play a key role in keeping the plant operating and safe. If operators spend most of their time
focusing on Responsibility #1 due to poorly managed alarms, they can't focus other responsibilities
that drive economic value.

During a Start-Up or Shutdown, many alarm lists are full of alarms that don’t apply. Operators monitor the alarm list for known and important alarms. This can limit the rate at which a facility can be brought up to production or brought down to a controlled shutdown. Keeping irrelevant alarms off the alarm list during a process transition can allow for faster process transitions and reduces the risk of missing an important alarm.

Improving alarming metrics make the operator experience less stressful.  Having an hourly alarming rate of less than 12 alarms per hour means that the operator can correctly respond to each alarm. Reducing alarm flood events means the operator is less frequently on high alert trying to assess the process, determine what happened and decide on the correct response. This reduces operator stress; operator fatigue and operator turn over. 

Facilities can tell stakeholders such as employees, management, insurance providers and the surrounding public that they follow externally set standards for Alarm Management that are accepted as "good engineering practice". 

Management has peace of mind knowing they have taken the time and spent resources reduce the risk of negative environmental, safety or economic events. 

Every abnormal situation that ends in a negative event wasn’t caught by alarms. For this reason poor alarming practices contribute to industrial accidents but are often not the root cause. 

“We know we have issues with our alarms, but we can’t seem to fix them”

Many sites struggle with and are frustrated by Alarm Improvement.  It seems impossible to achieve noticeable results and the right people to investigate, approve, and implement alarm changes are never available.  In our own attempts to improve customers alarms we have experienced the same frustrations.

“We didn’t design these alarms we inherited them.”

In many cases alarms were designed by a group that does not operate the plant such as a capital projects department or an engineering design firm.  It’s also common for control logic to be migrated from an older control system and the alarms copied with the logic.  In both cases the design of the alarms and the alarming system are lacking.

“Our alarm list is full of alarms our operators can’t resolve.”

In a modern control systems many components report their status and health.  Devices such as control valves and sensors along with system components like controllers, network switches and workstations report failures and the need for maintenance.  If all these alerts are sent to the process operator the operator is overloaded by conditions they cannot address.

“Can’t you just do this on your own? We don’t have the staff to do this.”

Customers have the misconception that improving their alarms is easy; that their night shift instrument tech, intern or lead operator can review and improve alarms and that an alarm review should take a couple of days at best. The classification of alarming issues as one-dimensional sets an unrealistic expectation and is not true.

“Our Alarming Metrics Never Seem to Get Better”

Many alarm improvement services show graphics, real-time charts or advanced mathematics to quantify alarming issues.  This gives the misconception of progress and that the identified issues are easy to fix.  However, 90% of the work, all the frustrations and the actual improvements come from making changes to the alarming system.  Alarming metrics will stay the same month after month and year after year until changes are made to the alarming system.

The Solution

Implement Alarm System Management based off a recognized standard such as ISA 18.2, IEC 62682 or EEMUA 191.

Alarm System Management is a set of processes that provide effective alarms to operators. These processes are summarized in the Alarm Management Lifecycle Diagram below.
The Lifecycle can be implemented in stages to fit a sites budget and available resources.

“Infrastructure” components like the Alarm Philosophy document and Management of Change set the stage for Rationalization, which can be done incrementally by area or unit.

Alarm Management Lifecycle

How can Lakeside Help?

A one-time review of alarming metrics and a discussion of issues.
 
  • Calculating alarming metrics using events data
  • Comparing the results to recommended standards
  • Reviewing site specific alarming practices (priorities, operating areas, shelving practices, annunciation)
  • Reviewing common alarming issues (chattering, stale alarms, alarm floods, bad actors)
  • Exploring ways to address alarming issues 

While an assessment on it's own will not improve concerning metrics, it is an essential first step towards addressing the issues.

A Lakeside engineer, specializing in Alarm System Management, collaborates with the facility to implement various aspects of the Alarm Management Lifecycle. This work can be guided by any of the recognized alarming standards, such as ISA 18.2, EEMUA 191, or IEC 62682. The scope and pace of the project can be customized to align with the facility's resources.

For sites lacking a robust alarming program, the process may begin with an Alarm Assessment and the development of an Alarm Philosophy. This can progress to a trial Rationalization for a specific unit or area. Other partial implementations might include establishing audit procedures to ensure the alarms in the Master Alarm Database match the control system configuration or assisting in the development of tools to calculate alarming metrics.

This consulting service involves a Lakeside engineer providing expert advice and working closely with facility personnel.

DeltaV™ AgileOps is automation software designed to streamline and enhance the implementation of Alarm Management Systems based on standards like ISA 18.2, EEMUA 191, and IEC 62682. Unlike costly in-house tools, AgileOps is a commercially available, supported product with modules for various parts of the Alarm Management Lifecycle.

 

  • Performance Analytics: Provides pre-built and customizable reports for monitoring alarm performance.
  • Database: Stores the Master Alarm Database, tracks changes, and allows audits by comparing DCS alarms to the database.
  • Dynamics: Enables dynamic or state-based alarming, ensuring alarms are relevant to the current process state.
  • Alarm Shelving: Offers advanced shelving capabilities to reduce stale and nuisance alarms, auto re-enable alarms, and create shelved lists for different users.
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