Practical alarm management

Here's the second book of the Alarm Management Gospel, this time the Gospel According to Bridget Fitzpatrick, practice lead for ASM at Mustang Engineering.

Practical Alarm Management-- Getting Started...Getting It Done

From the abstract, "Bridget Fitzpatrick will provide an overview of teh Mustang Engineering Alarm Management Improvement Process. Key topics include the key deliverables from an alarm management project, approaches to getting started, lessons learned from past projects." Mustang is the largest system integrator in the world, and is really one of the largest E&C companies in the world. Alarm management improves operator tools for upsets, avoids control system overloads during upsets, and identifies areas for improvement. Alarm overload can easily cause data corruption! EEMUA Guide and ISA-SP18 are the standards. There are four core principles of the EEMUA Guide:

• alarm system should be designed to meet user needs
• alarm system's purpose is to protect the safety of people, the environment and the plant equipment
• the performance of the alarm system should be assessed
• every alarm must be justified and properly engineered

Fitzpatrick went on to discuss the design cycle Mustang uses for alarm management, which implements the stages Rothenberg spoke about earlier.