Improvements in Alarm Analysis

Pradeep Singh
Sr Process Control Engineer, Woodside
2012 Honeywell Users Group Asia Pacific

Overview
Recent progress in alarm management
Increased focus by management
New/updated standards ISA, EEMUA
Alarm tools by vendors

Current alarm tools perform many functions, but lack in providing the most relevant
actionable information.
Such actionable information can be generated using data available in DCS historian and
maintenance systems.
Readily available tools are adequate Excel, Access, DCS Historian, Maintenance
system database, etc.

Step one Generate alarm history

Two sets of data are generated for every DCS tag.
Shows # of times a tag has alarmed and
# of times it has been acknowledged,
in each of the last 7 days
and in each of the last 4 weeks.
Tag alarmed 6 times and
acknowledged 5 times.

7 Day Alarm History

Tag-A (HIGH Freq Alarm)

5(5), 2(2), 6(21), 5(6), 1(2), 1(1), 4(5)

22(38), 17(32), 15(38), 36(82)

Tag-B (LOW Freq Alarm)

,,,,,,

, , (1),

No alarm/ ack event.

4 Week Alarm History

Step two Generate status flags

Generate status flags for each tag
Whether the alarm is disabled
Whether the tag is currently in alarm
Whether this is a recent alarm (>10 times in any of the last 4 days and
at least one alarm in the last day).
Whether this is a Frequent Alarm (> 14 alarms over last 28 days)
Whether the tag has an outstanding alarm action/ maintenance Noti.

Step - 3 Generate recommended actions

For each combination of status flags, a default recommended action is generated.
For example:

Finally take action after further tag specific review.

Rationale for proposed approach

Identifies alarms that are needlessly disabled.
Identifies maintenance notifications that are no longer
needed.
Identifies non-compliances with various alarm procedures.
Captures the time aspect of tags alarm performance e.g. a
long-standing alarm issue that got fixed yesterday is
appropriately identified.
Filters out occasional alarms that are generated as a part of
normal plant operation.

Summary

Significant available information

Alarm events for (~ 50,000) configured alarms over a month.
Maintenance notifications for hundreds of alarm related issues
analysed with readily available tools (with some programming)
to generate a table of (~ 30) recommended actions with clear,
relevant and actionable information.
An off-the-shelf tool to do the above will be good to have.