Comprehensive Guide to Alarm Management, Rationalization and Suppression to Achieve Optimum Situational Awareness in the Control Room

Imagine yourself sitting in front of process control console with thousands or hundreds or even dozens of buzzing, beeping and flashing alarms at fast rate. Each alarm requires your attention, analytic abilities, and response action. You will feel either panic or indifference but, surely you will be overwhelmed. Being overwhelmed in control morning is not a good sign, it affects operator response time and make him more borne to error and mistakes. It demises situational awareness and increase operation risk.

In complex process systems, automation and control systems play key role in measuring and controlling process parameters & monitoring equipment status and by doing that, automation and control system generates and display alarms to operators to notify process deviations and requesting operator action to stabilize process. Generated alarms are always beyond capacity of operator to handle even in well-designed alarm systems especially during process upsets events in which alarms floods occurs.

Alarms management is required to monitor alarm metrices and maintain alarm targets within acceptable limits. This paper will provide readership with general alarm management concepts, asset and organization prerequisite requirements, alarm management system infrastructure and data architecture.

It will describe alarm management system design & implementation process (such as developing alarm philosophy, building alarm master database/alarm catalogue, setting up alarm management tool, setup Alarm KPIs, etc..). Once system is set and KPIs are collected and reported, alarm bad actors’ rationalization can begin. The paper will illustrate alarm bad actor rationalization workflows as follows:

1. Setup alarm management rationalization team and rationalization session and establish bad actor management register.
2. Identify bad actors alarm module tag, description, and other information, metric affected (Alarm Rates/Floods/chattering & repeating /standing, Nuisance), alarm type (process alarm, system alarm, bad.PV, equipment state alarm, etc..).
3. Define start/cause of high count (Process deviation, mode of operation, maintenance related, design issue, operation practices, etc..).
4. Develop corrective actions that solve high count causes (typically CMMS notification to maintenance /MOC to change process/SOP review to change operator practices, etc..).
5. Determine if alarm management and rationalization techniques are required. Alarm management techniques can be simple or advances.
   • Simple Alarm Management techniques such as
     • Alarm set point change
     • Alarm templates
     • Alarm deadlands & hysteresis
     • Alarm on-off delays
     • Alarm Filters
     • Alarm Simple suppression
     • Alarm Grouping)
     • Alarm Shelving
   • Advanced Alarm Management techniques
     • Dynamic alarming (state-based suppression, batch operation suppression, time-based suppression)
     • First out alarming for multiple alarm suppressions over single process upset
     • Alarm flood suppression

6. Design & implement Alarm change via simplified yet thorough and focused MOC process especially design to handle alarm system changes without utilizing full MOC process designated for more complex modifications.

The paper will also, provide for readers some insights on

• Simple/advanced alarm management techniques including when to you each techniques, pros & cons of each techniques and best practice in design & implementation as well as Alarm solution analysis and decision trees for solution efforts escalation.
• Alarm Shelving requirements and best practices & rulesets will also be presented to maximize value.
• Simplified MOC process used in managing changes and modifications in alarm system.

Finally, the paper encourages organization to embark on alarm management journey by highlighting a case study in which these practices were implemented and demonstrated effectiveness in dealing with alarm cumbersome issues.