Modern control systems make it easy (maybe too easy) to add alarms without significant effort, cost, or consideration for whether they are truly needed. This has led to alarm systems that often hinder, rather than help, operators by subjecting them to nuisance alarms, alarm floods, incorrectly prioritized alarms, and general alarm overload. Alarm rationalization, a proven alarm management technique and one of the stages of ISA-18.2/IEC 62682 alarm management lifecycle, can help address these issues and create an effective alarm system that better supports the operator.
If you have ever wondered how to determine when and if an alarm is needed, then this webinar is for you. It will also talk about how to establish an effective alarm limit, how to determine the importance of an alarm, and how to assign it to a class. It will show how key results of rationalization (including the cause, consequence and corrective action of each alarm) can be used to create operator response procedures which help operators respond more quickly and consistently to each alarm. Finally it will show how the use of a tool, such as exida’s SILAlarm, can effectively guide newcomers through the rationalization process.
Todd Stauffer, PE, is responsible for exida’s alarm management products and services (training, consulting, SILAlarm™ rationalization software). He has been an editor and voting member of the ISA-18.2 standards committee on alarm management since 2005. He was an active participant in the development / publication of the ISA-18.2 standard itself and as an editor / reviewer for ISA’s series of technical reports on alarm management (including ISA-18.2 TR1 “Alarm Philosophy” and TR3 “Basic Alarm Design” for which he served as co-chair). He is currently the co-chair of the joint working group developing ISA-84.91.03 “Functional Safety of Safety Controls, Alarms, and Interlocks for the Process Sector”. Todd is an instructor for ISA’s official training class on alarm management and is exida’s representative on the EEMUA 191 committee.
He has executed numerous alarm philosophy workshops, gap assessments, and alarm management training classes for different control system platforms. Todd developed exida’s alarm philosophy best practices template. He is also the product manager for the SILAlarm rationalization software tool. Todd is an industry thought leader in alarm management. He has published numerous articles and presented many papers at supplier user group and industry conferences. His presentations have garnered three “Best in Conference” nominations and his article “Don’t be Alarmed: Avoid Unplanned downtime from alarm overload“ was selected as Intech magazine’s best article of the year in 2007.