The Journey Towards Zero Alarms - an Integrated Approach to Process Alarm Elimination

Alarm Management practices have been in place in the process industries for decades. Ever since Distributed Control Systems brought the price of adding an alarm down so significantly, the problem has been high alarm rates that overload the operator or alarm floods in an upset. In this paper, we will review some of the simple practices that the ASM Consortium has been recommending – things like finding and fixing "Bad Actors". We will go on to show how modern analytics watches both alarms and the measured process variables for “near alarms”, so processes run within their Integrity Operating Window. Today, rigorous Enterprise Risk Assessment methodologies provide good input about the consequences of deviation, so the priorities of Alarms can be set rationally. And the expanding capabilities to aggregate and analyze historian data is making all this data transparently available to process safety professionals and leadership to drive improvements. Anyone can and should be applying these practices to ensure their “alarm layer of protection” is effective and can be given some credit in their risk analyses.

In this paper, we will show the results of recent projects where operating companies have significantly improved the effectiveness of their alarm systems by reducing nuisance alarms and, more importantly, by reducing alarm demand rates by better operations. And we’ll show how operating companies are experimenting with expanding to include digitized operator rounds data into their operating historian – complete with alarms on this new data stream.

This paper examines the evolution of alarm management practices across the maturity spectrum of process industry users and uses real world examples from Honeywell’s work with operating companies that illustrate the coming age of alarm management practices to drive the utopian goal of zero alarms.