Common Misconceptions and Pitfalls in Alarm Management

Alarm floods and their detrimental impact on plant operations has been known for over 20 years yet very little progress has been made in industry to eliminate them. Many plants have fallen into the trap of repeating the same ineffective processes over and over again hoping for but not obtaining the desired results. Although many dollars and much time has been consumed applying these methods, very little actual gain in control of alarm floods has been realized. Some have even given up on achieving real results.

Today, improvements in alarm management are demanded by OSHA because ISA 18.2 is now RAGAGEP.

This presentation will discuss many common misconceptions, pitfalls and outright mistakes plants can make that delay or hinder their chances for success. Some of these items may also reflect poorly on the plant in the event of an incident. We will also show elements of alarm management that will increase chances of success.

Some of the issues we will discuss:

• Ignoring dynamic behavior
• Alarming normal events or actions
• Only do bad actors
• Eliminate start-up and shutdown from graphics of alarm metrics
• Alarm messages not clear or relevant
• No consequences for an alarm
• We only need to rationalize tags with alarms
• Using alarm settings to trigger interlocks
• Our goal is to reduce the alarm count
• Allowing operators to change alarm limits or other configuration settings