Siemens PCS 7 is a powerful distributed control systems (DCS) that is used throughout the world. One of the challenges that users have is determining how to best harness the platform’s alarm management capabilities. The purpose of this presentation is to discuss alarm management tools and capabilities that can be used with PCS 7 to comply with the ISA-18.2 / IEC 62682 alarm management lifecycle, to reduce unwanted shutdowns (trips), reduce risk, and improve operator effectiveness.
Highlights include discussion of how to improve navigation and situation awareness, analyze alarm system performance, perform rationalization, present the results of rationalization to the operator via Alarm Help, use alarm shelving (manual alarm hiding), configure designed suppression (automatic alarm hiding), and use out-of-service (alarm locking). It will discuss the benefits of switching to the Advanced Process Library (APL) and switching from the Classic Messaging System to the User Configurable Messaging System. Examples will be shown from Siemens PEA, exida SILAlarm, SyTech XLReporter, and from native PCS 7 (Hit List, Alarm Horn, etc).
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.