Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

HMI SCADA-08
Best Practices
for Alarm
Management

Rob Kambach

HMI/Supervisory Market Spectrum

Key
Needs/Aspects

Machine

Ease of Use
Process Visualization
Basic Alarming
Short Term History
Device Connectivity

Process

Larger Tag/Graphic
Counts
Graphic Standards
Extensible Vis (Client
Controls)
Basic Reporting
Basic Alm
Management

Plant

Server Consolidation
Standard Equipment
Model
Thin Client
Centralized Historian
Fault Tolerance
Situational Awareness
Advanced Alarm
Management

Products

Scale/Cumulative

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Site

Multi-Plant
HMI/Common Control
Room
Large Engineering
Teams
Common Standards

Enterprise

Monitoring
Operational Centers
PIMS (Information
Management)

Current state around alarming

Configured alarms per operator

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Economical impact
Affecting several crucial areas of plant operations:
- Reduces the operational effectiveness
- Economical impact: Unnecessary plant shutdowns (in the USA alone this
costs $20 Billion a year on productivity)
- Poor alarm management also causes losses in product quality, danger to
population and environment and/or image loss of a respective company

Source : ASM Consortium

Abnormal Situation Management

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Safety Impact

Texaco Pembroke 1994

Bunkfield Oil Depot

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Piper Alpha North sea 1988

Why did the number of alarms

increase?

Automation evolution (including fieldbus) brought more accessible

information per sensor/actuator

Alarms are easily configurable now (no more wired) -> no real cost
at engineering or operating time to add alarms

People (SI/EPC) tend to believe more is better : nothing can happen

without notice if everything has an attached alarm

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

A set of standards and guidelines

EEMUA 191, Alarm systems a guide to design
Namur NA 102 Worksheet, Alarm Management
NPD YA 711, Principles for alarm design (Norwegian petroleum doctorate
slowly adopted throughout Europe as the standard)
VDI/VDE Guideline 3699 (process control using monitors)
ISA S18.02, Management of alarm systems for the process industry
IEC 62682 Alarm Management Standard

API RP-1167
Alarm
Management
For Pipeline
Systems

ANSI/ISA 18.2
Management
of Alarm
Systems for
the Process
Industries

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

IEC 62682 Alarm Standard Worldwide

Introduces vendor neutral terms
Shelving, Initiated by Operator to temporarily suppress an Alarm
Suppressed by Design, Mechanism implemented within that prevents the
transmission of the alarm indication to the operator based on Plant State
Out of Service, is the state of a alarm indication that is suppressed, typical
manually, for reasons such as maintenance
These map to our system as Shelving, Plant State and Inhibit or Disabled

The standard requires that all alarms currently shelved, suppressed by

design and out of service can be listed. Alarms must be under access
control to be placed out of service. If an alarm is placed out of service it
must be recorded.
Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Situational Awareness HMI and Alarms Combined

Traditional HMI
What Happened ? Critical
Alarm
Grid
Process
Tool
Trends
Knowledge
Operational
Operator
Limits

Tool

Impact
SA Graphics
What is Happening ?

Knowledge
Operator

Alarm
Boundaries

Interpretation time
Time

Alarm
- 40 %
Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Advanced Graphics, EEMUA, ISO

Identify what type of information and support people
need in order to be able to deal successfully with
(Higher) Plant Operating Target
unanticipated events
(Fewer) Planning Constraints

(Fewer) Operational Constraints

Days per Year

APG Efforts
Recovery of
3-8% of Capacity
Plant Capacity Limit

< 60%
Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

95%
Daily Production

100%

2014 System Platform Alarm Enhancements

Before 2014.you could build your own alarm Appbut you needed the know how.
Setup the logger
Define Queries
Configure/Connect Databases
Have SQL Server SA
Passwords
Wire the Runtime to
History
Repeat all the same for
Visualization
Setup the logger as service

Released January 2014

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

2014 delivers this experience

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Applying the guidelines

1.Alarm Priorities
Priority 1
Priority 2
Priority 3
Priority 4
Priority 5

2.The system shall only represent four active alarm priorities:

Critical (only Safety and Emergency related)
High
Medium
Low
Events and logging only no Alarms.

1.The four priorities and the impact to the business and operation.
2.Ranking and economical scale:

Operational risk of the Alarms

Define response times for each category

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Severity indication on alarm borders

Severity 1 response time < 5min
Severity 2 response time < 30min
Severity 3 response time < 60min

Specification

Severity 4 response time < 120min

Wonderware
Implementation

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Global Priority to Severity mapping

One location to change and customizable image

Default Alarm Border Icons

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Global defined styles for alarm colors

and borders
One place to change how graphics represent Alarms

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Alarm Border Animation

Runtime

Global Icons

Global Styles
Auto Configuration for Field_Attributes or Objects

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Possible Alarm Border States on Graphics

2014 R2
Alarm Border
Can represent multiple alarms
Its show the Alarms in the following
order of importance
Using something we call Most Urgent

In Alarm Acked
Un-Acked Flashing

Was in Alarm
Returned to Normal
Un-Acked

Disabled or Inhibited
(Engineering)

Shelved
(Operator)

Silenced /
Suppressed
(Operator,
PlantState)

Un_Acked Severity
Acked
Unacked RTN Normal
Shelved
Disabled, Inhibited
Silence

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

Transitions
logged

Yes

Yes

No

Yes, tab
Shelved

No

In Alarm
Summary
Display

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Indicated in
alarm
border

Yes

Yes

Aggregated/
Counted

Yes
No
No
Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

1,2,3,4
1,2,3,4
1,2,3,4
1,2,3,4
1,2,3,4
1,2,3,4

Alarm Aggregation

Counted and totalized by Area or Object

Active count
On any level
In the model

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

2014 R2 Release System Platform

If for 2014
we delivered this.

Releasing October 2014

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

2014 R2 delivers this:

Scalability Factor times 10
Clients with out of the box experience
Shelving and plant state suppression built-in

Alarm App

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Update Clients: Runtime

Tabbed filtering
Actual alarm indicators on Tabs
Ack buttons
And styles and themes setup as default

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Updated Clients: Historical

Defined with the standard Themes and Styles colors

Fonts best Practices HMI Standards
Dynamic Filter tabs
Group By functionality

History Blocks
Extra Columns
Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Severity Indication in Runtime and

History mode within the Alarm Symbols

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Widgets for Alarming

Area Indicator

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Object or Device Indicator

Navigation Badges

Alarm Shelving
Who Can Shelve?

Shelving from Alarm Client or Scripting

Mandatory: a Reason and duration

What can be shelved?

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Audit trail logged to Historian

Any configured alarm can be shelved
Only enabled Alarms can be shelved
Alarm Border integration

Alarms Plant State-Based Suppression

Global definition of plant states

Area object based suppression of alarms

Individual state on the area object has an I/O Extension
Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Added Operational Permissions

Who can Shelve
Who can Inhibit / Disable
Who can change Plant State
Who can modify Alarm and Event
configurations

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Operational organization of alarms

Engineering

Inhibit / Disabled
Based on Maintenance

Operator

Shelving
Based on temporary
conditions

PLC

Plant State
Based on production
Conditions

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Unified Attribute Editor

Same UI on any object
to manage alarms
Duplicate Function
Bulk Editing
Smart Filter
Icons that show what
Features are On or Off

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

New High Performance Storage and

Retrieval
Choice upon install logging to legacy DB A2ALMDB
100 messages per second

History Blocks same as process data

2000 messages per second

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Release of WW Alarm Analyst Q1 2015

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Wonderware Alarming 2.0

Differentiators

Easy to Use
Compliance to regulations and best practices around alarming
Alarm rationalization In context with Situational AwarenessOUT OF
THE BOX!!!!!
Scalable by 10X , 2000 messages per second sustained
Redundancy built-in as an option
Most Robust system in the industry using Store & Forward
Highest throughput in the industry
Completely re-invented and revamped Alarm system to deal with the
demands, flexibility and safety requirements of todays and tomorrows
projects
Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Monthly
Alarm Rationalization

Approach

Active
When

Annual
Analysis of Current Situation
Operator
Input

1
Alarm Design

Alarm
Adviser

Plant State
Shelving

Alarm Philosophy
Review
Alarms

Plant State

Why

Operational
Limits
Document

Wonderware
Software

Fleeting
Implementation Determine
Standing

Suppression
Implement

Eliminate
Noise

Fleeting
Frequent
Bad Actors

Alarm Performance Assessment

Alarm
Adviser

Determine Fleeting
Determine Frequent
Determine Standing
Determine Bad Actors

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Alarm Adviser - Overview

Common UI/UX
Up to 10 years of historic alarm data
Multiple sites/plants/systems
Connects to

Vijeo Citect
InTouch
System Platform
ClearSCADA
Foxboro

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Configuration Priority & Severity

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Dashboard

The dashboard is
available to all users

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Dashboard User defined KPIs

EEMUA 191 Standards

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Alarm Activity Severity Distribution

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Frequent Alarms

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Long Standing Alarms - Longest

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

This makes a strong case

to manage 95% of your alarms in System Platform

Typical 80% is low, 15% is medium, 4% is High, 1% Critical

Meaning 95% of your alarms do not cause a shutdown
By moving these alarms out of the PLC, you create room and make
management a lot easier
Benefits:

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Centralized Configuration
One approach to Shelving and Plant State
Redundancy Built-in
Out-of-the box Styles and Alarm Borders
Aggregation Built-in
Counting Built-in
Severities Built-in (used for rationalization)

Where does this give you the advantage?

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.

Thank you!

2015 Schneider Electric. All Rights Reserved.

Wonderware
Conference.
Schneider
Electric
confidential.
All trademarks
are owned by
Schneider
Electric
Industries SAS or its affiliated companies or their respective owners.

Wonderware Conference. Schneider Electric confidential.