New white paper from MAC Solutions on how to make sense of alarm system performance KPIs
02/08/2018
MAC Solutions, developer of the ProcessVue® suite of alarm management software, and Lieven Dubois, a leading international authority on alarm management, have co-authored a white paper, titled: ‘The Sense and Nonsense of Alarm System Performance KPIs’.Alarm system performance key performance indicators (KPIs) have been in existence since the release of the EEMUA 191 guide. In 1998, the Bransby & Jenkinson survey concluded that one alarm per ten minutes was considered very likely to be acceptable. Since then, however, these KPIs have been improved. One alarm per ten minutes was quickly translated to six alarms per hour. Upon its release in 2009, the ISA 18.2 alarm management standard stated that approximately 150 alarms per day would be acceptable as a KPI. The international standard IEC 62682:2014 states that around 144 alarms per day would be a good target value. ISA 18.2 (2016) omitted this KPI completely, along with two other KPIs. The paper explains why, including why one alarm per time frame cannot be translated into so many alarms per hour.
Topics discussed in the paper include how to specify realistic KPIs, the role of the operator(s), the dangers of averaging, unauthorised actions, the dangers of multi-tasking, specifying meaningful (and achievable) values for specific operations as KPIs in the alarm philosophy and choosing the right alarm system performance measuring tools to support these systems.
The paper should appeal to a wide range of process industry plants, particularly upper- and lower-tier COMAH- or FDA-regulated sites. These include oil & gas, petrochemical, chemical, pharmaceutical, power stations, food processing and water companies. It does not matter what the customer’s process is or what types of plant-wide control system they have in place. If there is a need to manage and resolve alarm issues on site, the paper can offer useful advice and guidance.
Lieven Dubois said: “The alarm philosophy is the place to specify alarm system KPIs that make sense and are achievable in your plant. Rather than specifying a number of alarms per operator, per hour, per shift or per day, more attention should be given to the interval of annunciated alarms. An interval should be long enough for the operator to read and understand the message, to acknowledge that human intervention is required and to have time to perform the required actions.
“Multiple alarms annunciated at the same time with little or no interval often point to the same problem. Under the assumption that a set of alarms generated in a short period of time point to the same problem or root cause, and the situation can be returned to normal with a limited set of actions, one could argue that there is no need for multiple alarms. Consequently, it is recommended to replace all of those alarms with one single alarm using advanced logic, with meaningful information, diagnostics and proper advice,” he concluded.
