Poor alarm management can undermine both productivity and safety. As the number of alarms within plants increase, effective alarm management becomes especially important. Taking this further, the implementation of innovative hardware and software, as well as smart field devices, has added another level which must also be managed. Combined, this can lead to over-alarming and alarm floods afflicting operators when upsets occur.
Working in conjunction with alarm rationalization consultants while implementing software to guide and track the process, companies can rethink protection and develop an alarm hierarchy to rank alarms and events according to their impact on the process. Such programs can reduce the number of alarms needed, while also improving operator response performance and increasing uptime.
Our sister website Chemical Processing explores opportunities to enhance operational performance through rationalized alarm management along with the software that can be used to clarify corrective operator actions.
