Alarm Safety Seminar

Todd Stauffer of Exida  will give a presentation entitled “Closing the Holes in the Swiss Cheese Model” – Maximizing the Reliability of Operator Response to Alarms.

Topic: James T. Reason, Ph.D., is credited with establishing the model for representing process safety layers of protection as slices of swiss cheese. An operator’s response to an alarm is one of the first layers of protection to prevent a hazard from escalating to an incident. This presentation discusses how to maximize the operator’s reliability when responding to abnormal situations; thus “closing the holes in the swiss cheese layer”. It discusses how to follow the alarm management best practices defined in the ISA-18.2 standard and how human factors impact operator performance (e.g., why operators may ignore nuisance alarms).

Speaker: Todd Stauffer is the Director for Alarm Management Services at Exida. He is an editor and voting member of the ISA-18.2 standards committee on alarm management, co-chair of ISA’s WG3-Basic Alarm Design, and co-chair of the ISA-84.91.03 standard on safety alarms, controls, and interlocks. He has published and presented numerous papers on alarm management. His article “Don’t be Alarmed: Avoid Unplanned downtime from alarm overload” was selected as Intech magazine’s best article of the year in 2007. Todd earned a BS in Mech. Eng. from PSU and an MS in Mech. Eng. from the Univ. of Pennsylvania. He is a registered PE in PA.

Schedule:

• 5:30 – 6:00 pm Meet in the Hershey Company Tech Center Cafe
• 6:00 – 7:00 pm Presentation with light dinner (sandwiches, salad, beverage)
• 7:00 – 7:30 pm Q&A and discussion
• 7:30 pm Adjourn

Note: Upon arrival at the Tech Center, use the side 'employee' entrance, ring the buzzer to be let in, sign in with security (organization is AIChE, and Lou Felice is the person you are meeting), get a visitor's badge, and get directions to the Tech Center Cafe.

RSVP: Due by Thursday, March 15.  You can RSVP via Paypal here 

, or send an email stating the number of attendees, member type(s) (employed, student, unemployed, or retiree) and whether or not PDH certificates are required to aichesusquehanna@gmail.com.

PDH certificates will be mailed out the week following the meeting.