The design and improvement of alarm systems in process plants is

attracting considerable attention recently

By Sarang Wadyalkar

Alarm management, by empowering an operator to diagnose the faults

properly and initiate corrective actions, plays an important role in
improving the performance of plant assets. A particular alarm system
design can significantly affect the operator's success rate in receiving
and processing alarms. In a plant we may have thousands of alarms
and Indian electric power major NTPC has a fleet of such power plants.
Each plant may have different life span and a unique behavior,
resulting in unique causes for alarms. The process of alarm
management takes a hit sometimes due to extraneous factors, apart
from process related inputs, for example personnel change over.
Greater involvement from operators helps immensely to understand
the effectiveness of the alarm system and suggest improvements. It is
not just the absence of the person who has left, but the knowledge
about alarms/event history that goes missing. When this happens one
may have to compromise on safety and efficiency. These are probably
the reasons why NTPC is going to use effective alarm analysis system
for all its units, specially developed by BHEL for NTPC.

Indian power major NTPC and state owned BHEL, had collaborated
successfully for (PADO) performance analysis, diagnostic and
optimization tool for power plant performance. The two companies
again form the core of development of a tool in alarm analysis system
that will make a power plant operator’s job easier as far as his
response to fault identification and action after that is concerned.
Data required for alarm analysis typically includes inputs, such as tags,
descriptions, priority and type of events, date and time of events,
operator response, tolerance limits, and such others. It also plays an
important role in monitoring, assessing, and auditing the alarm
management system. With alarm analysis one can rationalize on
required number of alarms by isolating and analyzing individual plant
areas. Analysis also allows end users to benchmark system
performance with industry guidelines to measure effectiveness.
Going by the adage “you cannot manage what you cannot measure,”
alarm analysis stands as an integral part of alarm management giving
feedback on overall process effectiveness. The major criteria to take
action could be alarm priority, alarm activity, and probability of causes.
These also form KPIs for Alarm Analysis System (AAS) benchmarking
among similar process plants. Through benchmarking and sharing
their knowledge banks in AAS, users can develop an effective alarm
management strategy. This will also encourage suppliers to put
together solutions, which allow end users to design their own alarm
management system strategy.

All this becomes too much to handle for the operator and this may
result in potential dangers when operators start ignoring or missing
those alarms. A common practice is to suppress nuisance alarms, but
this approach without proper rationalization can result in high volume
of non-annunciated alarms that can have hazardous consequences
with financial losses, safety, and environmental impact. Alarm priority
represents risk management into the system and can compromise
safety and efficiency.

Several factors are important in the design or improvement of a given

alarm analysis system. Probability of success of human actions using a
given alarm system under a given fault condition is one obvious factor.
A systematic approach is necessary to consider the effects of all the
factors in evaluating a set of proposed alarm systems and in selecting
the most appropriate alarm system. One cannot buy an alarm
management system, as it is an evolving process and not a package.
Artificial intelligence solutions are not yet available. There are number
of important stages one has to go through. It involves planning,
rationalization, installation, verification, maintenance, and training.
For a DCS alarm system to be effective there are few barriers that
must be overcome before the alarm system can make a full
contribution to supporting the tasks of the process operator.

BHEL has developed an intelligent root cause analysis for analog and
digital alarms generated by Distributed Digital Control & Management
Information System. This involves implementation of Fault Trees for
analyzing the route cause for various alarm conditions in a power
plant. This has been developed on maxDNA platform so as to offer the
advantages and flexibility of the state of art DNA (Dynamic Network
Application). Operator is notified with the root cause for various alarm
conditions with probability percentage. The solution uses fault trees to
locate the root cause for various alarm conditions, from various
equipments or plant sections. There is additional software
encapsulated for computing the probability of various causes as per
the requirement. The system architecture includes logic and graphic
tree modules, probability computation engine, and reporting engine.

Logic tree module comprises of various fault tree logics made from
custom made atoms in maxDPU tools. This is downloaded onto a
Virtual DPU running on a specific maxSTATION where Root cause
analysis package is running. The atoms in these tree logics are
scanned/executed continuously in the specified DPU scan cycle. Once
an alarm is detected, the corresponding Logic tree is traversed by
checking the status of the medium of the condition tags assigned to
condition Atom. Subsequently the probability of the root cause is
annunciated.

Graphic tree module provide the operator graphical representation of

the fault trees and the traversal of tree logic for an alarm with
cause/probability. Probability computation engine calculates the
probability based on the predefined equations to handle single/multiple
cause situations through adaptive/learning mode calculation. The
computed probabilities are written back to the attributes of the
“cause’’ atom for displaying the most probable cause for an alarm.
This is used for reporting the cause to the operator with probability.

Among other benefits, the solution is inbuilt with DCS and requires no
additional external interfaces such as OPC and MODBUS for acquiring
the process signals. This avoids duplication of tags and minimizes the
errors while regrouping and synchronization, which eliminates the
delay in acquiring and writing back the signals.

Beyond solutions, it is always good to create an alarm philosophy and

update it. Re-evaluate and rationalize all the alarms for effectiveness
and priorities. Design and implement changes, identify and resolve
implementation issues. Create an alarm management team to review
alarm management strategies. Continuous training on new/changed
alarms is the key to obtain excellent operational results.
Please send your suggestions and feedback on sarangelite@gmail.com