Alarm Management 04
Alarm Management 04 : Alarm Problem History: Around the mid 80's, we entered the digital revolution. Distributed control systems (DCS) were a boon to the industry. The engineer could now control the process without having to understand the equipment necessary to perform the control functions. Panel boards were no longer required, because all of the information that once came across analog instruments could be digitized, stuffed into a computer and manipulated to achieve the same control actions once performed with amplifiers and potentiometers. As a side effect, that also meant that alarms were easy and cheap to configure and deploy. You simply typed in a location, a value to alarm on and set it to active. The unintended result was that soon people alarmed everything. Initial installers set an alarm at 80% and 20% of the operating range of any variable just as a habit. One other unfortunate part of the digital revolution was that what once covered several square yards of real estate, now had to be fit into a 17 inch computer monitor. Multiple pages of information was thus employed to replicate the information on the replaced panel board. Alarms were utilized to tell an operator to go look at a page he was not viewing. Alarms were used to tell an operator that a tank was filling. Every mistake made in operations usually resulted in a new alarm. With the implementation of the OSHA 1910 regulations, HAZOPS studies usually requested several new alarms. Alarms were everywhere. Incidents began to accrue as a combination of too much data collided with too little useful information
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