WHITE PAPER

Alarm Management 101

Understanding the role of
Alarm Annunciators in plant safety.
Some Key Performance Indicators
for a well designed plant.

AUTHOR:
I. Loudon
Omniflex
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Table of Contents

Table of Contents...................................................................... 2
Abstract..................................................................................... 2
Alarm Definition....................................................................... 3
Alarm Objective ....................................................................... 3
Introduction .............................................................................. 3
The Alarm System – where it fits on the plant ......................... 3
Alarm Strategy .......................................................................... 4

Regulatory Tools & Standards ............................................. 4

What is an alarm? ..................................................................... 4
What governs the operator’s response? .................................... 5

General Human Psychology ................................................. 5

Operator Intervention ........................................................... 5

Current Situation....................................................................... 5
Rationalise and Process ............................................................ 6
Too many alarms ...................................................................... 6
Alarms get ignored ................................................................... 6

Mass alarm acknowledgement ............................................. 6

Lack of real information ....................................................... 6

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) .......................................... 6

Four core principles of the guide are: ................................... 6

EEMUA System metrics: ..................................................... 6

EEMUA Usability metrics: .................................................. 6

The ISA Alarm Management requires: (extract) .................. 6

Alarm strategy .......................................................................... 7

Abstract
The aim of an alarm system is to prevent, or at
the very least minimize, physical and
economic loss to plant or people through
operator intervention in response to a plant
condition that has occurred thus making the
necessary corrective action optimizing
production.
Selection and prioritisation of alarms and
deciding which are deemed “Critical” that
need to be displayed on an alarm annunciator
to guarantee operator response under all
scenarios is not a trivial task. This paper
provides the principles behind the selection
and prioritisation of alarms on a safe plant.

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Alarm Definition
An alarm is classified as an event to which an operator must react, respond and acknowledge (not
simply acknowledge and ignore) and no plant should have more than 6 such alarm occurrences an
hour.
[EEMUA 191 guidelines]

If your plant has alarms occurring more frequently than that then your plant is at risk.

Alarm Objective
The objective of an alarm system is to minimize or prevent physical and economic loss through
operator intervention.

Note: Safety takes precedence over economics.

like the Electrical Equipment Manufacturers

Introduction
The aim of an alarm system is to prevent, or at
the very least minimise, physical and economic
loss to plant or people through operator
intervention in response to a plant condition
that has occurred thus making the necessary
corrective action optimizing production.
Alarm management has taken on a new
meaning in the wake of major process plant
disasters of recent years, such as Buncefield,
Chernobyl, BP Texas City, Bhopal and 3 Mile
Island to name but a few.
Collaborative work by large process
companies, vendors and industry organisations
and Users Association (EEMUA) and the
Instrumentation Society of America (ISA); has
resulted in a more universally accepted alarm
management strategy for process industries.
Accepting the need for alarm management
strategies; and applying new technology and
standards to the process, companies can
achieve multiple benefits.
These include better productivity, quality
improvement, a more motivated and
responsible staff, improved profitability and
efficiency while minimizing the potential
liability of management.

The Alarm System – where it fits on the plant

Figure 1 - Plant Operational 3 Layer Alarm Model

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White Paper - Alarm Management 101
The three layer plant model is the ideal for
plant control, efficiency and safety. However
in practice and this is often blended into one
single system for economic reasons.
For example a small plant may have PLC’s
doing control. Alarms and Shutdown
functionality are then added into the same
devices to save cost.
This causes the risk to plant and personnel to
rise significantly.
This is because failures in common equipment
and/or programming logic can render all three
layers inoperable, leaving the plant out of
control, and leaving the operator with no
visibility of plant conditions to respond.
Alarm Strategy
The driving forces behind adopting an
effective Alarm Management Strategy can be
classified as forced or voluntary.
Forced motivation may be compliance (or
regulatory) or risk mitigation. Voluntary
motivation is that which is driven by perceived
business benefits, profit, quality, efficiency
and safety. Alarm management strategy is
driven by both forced and voluntary forces.
Figure 2 - Events vs Alarms
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Regulatory Tools & Standards
The following documents provide invaluable
guidance in the adoption of a safe and effective
alarm management strategy:
 IEC61508 Safety Instrumented Systems
(IEC)
 EEMUA Guide Publication 191
(Engineering Equipment and Material
Users Association)
 ISA SP18-02
(ISA standards and practices committee)
What is an alarm?
The generally accepted definition of an alarm
is:
“An alarm is an event to which an operator
must react, respond and acknowledge”
Therefore the purpose of an alarm system is to
alert an operator(s) to a potential problem, that
if not addressed will cause some production,
process, quality or safety compromise.
To put an economic slant on this: the alarm
system is there to prevent, or at least minimize,
physical and economic loss through operator
intervention.
Quite often this infers prescribed operator
interventions in the event of an abnormal
condition to prevent the shutdown system from
shutting down the plant automatically.
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What governs the operator’s Current Situation

response? Studies have shown that there are several
common problems experienced in alarm
General Human Psychology
systems:
As a rule, people do not process all available
information, but rather generally look for
 There are too many alarms.
patterns in the world.
 Alarms are ignored by operators because
Once a pattern is recognized, then it becomes they categorise them as a nuisance
“reality”.  Alarm lists are overcrowded with data,
not alarms, causing alarms to be missed.
Operator Intervention
 Operators perform mass alarm
As soon as a pattern is selected, focus will shift acknowledgments i.e. cannot cope
from understanding the upset to implementing  Alarm systems fail to provide real insight
intervention activities. to support operator decision making.
Focus will not shift back to a new search for
the root cause until it becomes clear that the
intervention is not improving the situation or
several new alarms do not match the pattern
selected.

Figure 3 - The Operator Information Filtering

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Rationalise and Process
 Think of the HMI (Human Machine
Interface) as the funnel through which
data flows to the Operator, and processes
it to become information
 The alarm system and alarm priority is a
tool to direct the operator’s attention as
needed.
 What you do NOT show is as important
as what you do!
Too many alarms
Most SCADA and DCS installations are
configured to create too many alarms.
According to the EEMUA 191 guidelines, an
alarm is classified as an event to which an
operator must react, respond and acknowledge,
and no plant should have more than 6 such
alarm occurrences an hour.
How many installations have more than this?
Most do!
Alarms get ignored
Most alarms get ignored by operators because
so many are either inconsequential and/or
irritating. data for information purposes only.
Operators miss or ignore genuine alarms when
overwhelmed by trivial information.
Mass alarm acknowledgement
Alarms get globally acknowledged without
review.
Lack of real information
Masses of data is nothing without some form
of analysis and rationalization.
Key Performance Indicators
(KPIs)
Two good reference standards used currently
are EEMUA 191 and ISA 18.02. alarm system
and they focus on the following:
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Four core principles of the guide are:
 Alarm system should be designed to meet
user needs
 The 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 is justified and properly
engineered
EEMUA System metrics:
 3 alarms per control valve
 1 alarm per analogue measurement
 0.4 alarms per digital measurement
 10% high - 20% medium - 70 % low
priority alarm distribution
EEMUA Usability metrics:
 average alarm rate < 1 every 10 minutes
 < 10 alarms in 10 minutes after upset
(peak rate)
 < 10 standing alarms
 < 30 disabled or inhibited alarms
The ISA Alarm Management requires:
(extract)
 Purpose of alarm system,
 Motivation for improving the alarm
system,
 Definitions,
 References,
 Responsibilities for alarm management,
 Alarm management work processes,
 Operator responsibilities related to
alarms,
 Alarm design principles,
 Alarm presentation,
 Priority assignment method,
 Alarm system performance targets,
 Alarm system maintenance,
 Advanced alarm management techniques,
 Required alarm documentation,
 Periodic testing of alarms,
 Alarm system’s relationship to other site
procedures,
 Implementation,
 Management of change,
 Training,
 Alarm history preservation,
 Recommended process for developing
and maintaining the philosophy.
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Figure 4 – World Class Alarm Management Metrics

The combination of controls and alarms into

Alarm strategy single systems also compromised plant safety.

To get started, at a minimum, you need: Annunciators provided vital critical pattern
 A philosophy that sets the basic concepts. recognition for operators which we now know
 It can be a working draft! provides the fastest and most reliable reaction
 Lots of good resources from EEMUA and to abnormal events.
ISA. This caused a rethink of the role of alarm
 A project plan: annunciators on the modern plant, and the
 Goals, publication of key guidelines such as EEMU
 Metrics (with a base case), 191 and IEC61508, to manage the
 Schedule, implementation of safety systems on the plant.
 Budget,
 Resources.

Role of Alarm Annunciators

As computerisation and video screens
dominated the control desks, so the
prominence of alarm annunciation on the plant
The Omni16C Alarm Annunciator
as an indication tool rightly diminished.
This has caused a revival of the status of the
However the enthusiasm for integration and
alarm annunciator in industry over the last few
computerisation caused the compromise of
years. Strings of spectacular and catastrophic
operator response to critical alarms, inevitably
failures, as a result of the lack of clearly
buried in an overload of other data in complex
defined alarm strategies, has redefined the
screens, transient in their visibility and
thinking of plant designers worldwide.
positioning.

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Annunciator implementation of critical alarms
forces the designer at design stage to think
about the alarm strategy for the plant not at
implementation, where SCADA is being
configured by software engineers far removed
from plant design strategy.This eliminates the
unnecessary alarms being added. Only those
deemed to be necessary to plant function and
safety are designed in.
Role of Event Recorders
It is common to record all events that occur in
the DCS or SCADA system. This allows off-
line reporting and situation analysis, to quickly
diagnose the source of faults and to improve
plant efficiency.
However in many electrical processes, the
speed of occurrence of events makes it
impossible for the DCS or SCADA system to
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discriminate the sequence of events, and often
misrepresents the sequence, due to polling
nature of the acquisition of these events into
the database.
In these cases the use specialised Sequence of
Event (“SOE”) Recorders is a useful addition
to the plant instrumentation package to
improve plant efficiency by minimising
downtime. SOE systems can give resolution of
events to better than 1 millisecond – necessary
for many electrical systems.
It is no longer necessary for these systems to
be stand alone. The modern SOE systems can
be implemented as front end’s to the DCS or
SCADA system so that high speed events can
be integrated into the main historical database.
In some safety critical applications it may be
desirable to separate the SOE system from the
control system so that even instrumentation
failures can be successfully recorded.