Avoiding Abnormal Situations with Better Alarm Management
by Jim Cahill
Earlier this month my DeltaV News RSS feed announced the availability of an alarm management whitepaper written by the ARC Advisory Group. The paper, Emerson Strategies for Abnormal Situation Avoidance & Alarm Management, describes an issue many process manufacturers face in dealing with too many alarms. This makes it hard for their operators to distinguish between critical impending abnormal events and nuisance alarms.
The Emerson approach to address better management of alarms is based upon ARC's Six-Sigma DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) model and
…includes data collection, statistical analysis, alarm evaluation, and system improvement – all within the context of ongoing evaluation and continuous improvement.
Relative to alarm management, the whitepaper describes the DMAIC process:
Define relates to philosophy development, Measure relates to determining alarm behavior and alarm effectiveness, Analyze relates to root cause analysis and performance benchmarking, and Improve relates to the remedial action necessary to align the prevailing implementation with the alarm philosophy. Finally, Control relates to alarm execution.
Advancing technology is a source of the alarm proliferation. The authors note:
In the days of hardwired controls and alarms, engineers were very stingy with alarms, in part because each alarm point had a cost. The primary issue with alarm systems is there is too much information for an operator to assimilate and act on. Ten years ago, it cost about one thousand dollars to add an alarm. Current automation systems have essentially eliminated the cost of adding more alarms and, therefore, the incentive to limit or rationalize their number.
I have an upcoming post that discusses the importance of up-front planning your alarm strategy when you're planning your project's functional requirements. But what do you do in an existing facility with an alarm overabundance?
The whitepaper addresses building a business case to justify and alarm management project. The keys areas build the business case include safety, unplanned downtime, better information management and reduced troubleshooting time, and changing the role of the operator toward higher-value activities.
ARC notes that unplanned shutdown costs process manufacturers on aggregate between 2 percent and 5 percent annually. This may be a justification opportunity by looking at root causes of unplanned shutdowns in your plant. A review of the alarm and event logs around these incidents can reveal the number alarms the operators saw and the actions they took as a result.
The whitepaper also addresses the important role of the EEMUA Publication 191—Management of Process Alarms in developing your alarm management strategy. A guiding principle described in EEMUA 191:
…a usable alarm system must be relevant to the user's role at the time, indicate clearly what response is required, and be presented at a rate the user can deal with, and be easy to understand.
With this backdrop, the paper explores the applications within Emerson's DeltaV system like the Event Chronicle, integration with 3rd-party alarm management applications via the OPC alarms and events communication standard, and the DeltaV Analyze alarm analysis program. Coupling these applications with alarm management services can help process manufacturers through the process of data collection, statistical analysis, alarm evaluation, and system improvement.
And much like the safety lifecycle as defined by the IEC 61511 international safety standard, ongoing evaluation of the overall alarm strategy is important throughout the lifecycle of the plant.
Tags: alarm management
| alarm strategy
| alarm planning
| EEMUA
| six sigma
| DMAIC
| process alarms
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February 27, 2008 in Alarm Management, in Operator Performance | Comments (0)
Center for Operator Performance Seeks to Improve Operator Effectiveness
by Jim Cahill
I just received my November copy of Automation World magazine. In it is an article, Improving Human Effectiveness. Given the fact that I'm human and always seeking to improve my effectiveness, I had to give it a read.
The article is about the work of the Center for Operator Performance, a consortium from academia, engineering and automation suppliers and process manufacturers. Current members include Emerson, ABB, BP, Flint Hills Resources, Marathon Pipeline, Nova Chemicals, Suncor Energy, Wright State University, and Beville Engineering. The Operator Performance website is described as:
An alliance of academic and process companies to research generic issues in human factors and process operator performance. The goal is an open and low-cost forum for the identification, analysis, and dissemination of research in such areas as selection/training, interface design, decision aides, automation, procedures, and control room design.
Duane Toavs, a director of Emerson's Ease of Use Center was interviewed for the article. I know Duane from way back when he put one of the first Foundation fieldbus-based systems for a major oil producer on Alaska's North Slope in 1997. I can assure you from personal experience that it's not a fun to visit in mid-December!
In the article, Duane notes that operating companies outnumber the automation suppliers in the consortium by design, since they are, "...the experts in how well overall projects go." The intent is also to have these companies drive the research in the areas that will deliver the highest business benefit.
The Center's first research project looked at military combat decision-making exercises to perhaps use some of their ideas and apply it to decision support for plant operators. That's always one of my favorite tactics—to borrow good ideas from completely different areas and apply them to the problem at hand.
The study has revealed some surprises such as the most difficult units in a plant did not necessarily have the most expert operators. It seems that advanced controls apply this expertise. Also, there was not a correlation between operator age and experience. Some of these findings suggest that advanced control can help mitigate some of the expertise being lost to retirement.
Some of the future research ideas include early event detection, alarm actuation rate, simulator usage, and effective use of color/shape coding in graphic displays.
If you are looking for ways to increase the effectiveness of your operators, you may to join or visit their site from time to time. I've had a chance to speak with some members from the Center for Operator Performance team and suggested they start blogging to help interested parties better keep up with their progress. I have my RSS search enabled waiting to notify me if/when they do!
Tags: operator performance
| advanced control
| APC
| automation research
| control room design
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