This morning's final session in the "Best Practices" track focused on alarm management. Dr. Joseph Alford, recently retired from Eli Lilly, and Mik Marvan, Matrikon's alarm management product manager, threw a life preserver to automation professionals drowning in a tsunami of alarms. Dr. Alford condensed 35 years of batch processing alarm management experience into a few key slides.
To rescue the average batch processing plant floor operator from the more than 3,000 alarms he has to account for on a given shift, do the following things, says Dr. Alford
Using the "alarm management" system on a car as an example, he demonstrated the characteristics of an ideal alarming system. In a car, the "alarms," such as a low fuel guage, represent an "abnormal" situation that requires a response. The alarm systems are accurate and reliable. Ordinarily people don't question whether the low fuel indicator really means they have to stop for gas. These alarms permit a reasonable time for response: The driver has time to get to the gas station. Most important, the alarms are few in number, in spite of the fact that cars are complex systems. Why can't the alarm systems in our batch processing operations have the same characteristics, asks Dr. Alford.
Allowing for the additional characteristics of batch operations, such as multiple process steps, multiple phases, process loads, set points that are a function of time, and few, if any steady-state operations, these are his recommendations for building such a system.
Mik Marvan concluded the session with showing how Matrikon's Alarm Management System can help companies implement these best practices. See www.matrikon.com for detailed information about this system.