(41p) State-of-the-Art Alarm Management at Refinery Sites – a Way to Improve Process Safety

The rise of programmable control systems (BPCS) has created a situation where it is possible to configure many alarms at minimal cost, without questioning whether they are necessary. In the past, alarms were therefore often created in an unstructured way.

This has led to floods of alarms and undefined alarms, resulting in an increased potential for operator failures.

The alarm management lifecycle acc. the ISA 18.2 is a structured approach and a recognized methodology for avoiding unnecessary alarms, defining alarms correctly and providing operators with the information they need at the right time. The high-level goal: "Minimize the human error factor".

This session presents a practical implementation of a pilot project for alarm management at a process plant in the OMV Schwechat refinery, Austria.