Streamlining Instrument Base Layer Control : Key Element for Improving Alarm System Performance

Alarm management is one of the most important facets of process automation in the industry today. Poorly managed alarm system diminishes the effectiveness of the automation system as well as reducing the productivity of plant operators thus affecting the company’s bottom line. Ineffective alarm systems has been identified as one of the key contributors to numerous costly trips and safety incidents in the industry. To address this issue, a specific Alarm Management Guidelines for PETRONAS was developed and published to provide guidance in alarm management over the entire alarm life cycle taking into consideration best practices and guidelines published in EEMUA 191 and ISA 18.2. One of the key activities identified by the Guideline as the key success factors in managing process alarms is to ensure that the fundamental elements that made up the process control especially the field instrumentation and the DCS are properly designed, engineered, installed, configured, operated and maintained. Close collaboration between various disciplines especially instrument, process and operation as well as support from the DCS vendor are imperative in ensuring that the actions needed for the instrument base layer improvement which include verification of instrument and system settings, review of controller configuration and tuning parameters, cleaning up of DCS alarm registers, verification of alarm settings in DCS against the P&ID and the safe operating limit database etc are done correctly. To date, consistent application of this strategy coupled with proper alarm rationalization and alarm KPI monitoring have helped to significantly improve the reliability and integrity of process alarm system in PETRONAS facilities. The intent of this paper is to share best practices and provide some insights on how alarm system effectiveness can be improved by strategically enforcing the requirement of streamlining the control and monitoring layer as one of the key requisites for alarm management.