Practical No:

AIM: - To study Alarm Management System in DCS

OBJECTIVE:

To study various components of SCADA

To study various features of SCADA
To study Hardware and Software requirements of SCADA

THEORY:Introduction:
Alarm systems alert operators to plant conditions, such as deviation from normal operating limits and
to abnormal events, which require timely action or assessment. Alarms are thus key sources of
information to the operator in maintaining safety. It is important that alarm systems are well designed
and are used correctly.
Indeed, all DCSs have a sophisticated alarm and HMI system for operators to monitor and control
plant status. The DCS alarm system can be a vital, productive tool for managing industrial process
control plants, and can be configured to identify and notify personnel of a wide variety of abnormal
conditions in a manufacturing process.
Philosophy of Alarm Management
Alarm Management is imperative to assessing, improving and optimizing plant alarms, thereby
increasing the effectiveness of plant operators by only notifying them of a need for their intervention.
A poor alarm system results in billions of dollars lost every year to accidents, equipment damage,
unplanned plant or unit outages, off-spec production, regulatory fines and huge intangible costs
related to environmental and safety infractions. Alarm Management is about safety, the environment,
optimizing operations and increasing corporate profits.
One important philosophy is that the operator must have some action for any specific alarm. If the
action is not required, the alarm should be removed. Further, reducing or eliminating alarm floods
liberates an operator to respond to plant demands, enabling them to avoid shutdowns and keep the
plant running at optimal performance. In addition, the advanced alarming -- like alarm shelving -can dramatically reduce alarms temporarily during a specific period so the operators can focus on
important alarms and reduce startup/shutdown time.
The relationship between a DCS alarm system and an Alarm Management System is shown in
Figure1.

Figure 1
The alarm system of the DCS is the executer of all alarm functions. However, the Alarm
Management System is the monitor and optimizer for the DCS alarm system, which is used to reduce
nuisance alarms, rationalize related alarms, and avoid alarm floods and so on. In addition, some
advanced alarm functions like alarm shelving and alarm suppression can be added to existing DCS
alarm system to make it more effective.
As a result, it is possible to reduce unscheduled plant shutdowns, improve performance and mitigate
the risk of incidents and excursions and hence to enhance reliability and profitability by improving
the performance of the existing alarm system.
How does an Alarm Management System work?
The DCS alarm system can be optimized and enhanced by an Alarm Management System. An Alarm
Management System and service attempt to identify unnecessary alarms, improper alarm set values
and where improvements can be made to the current procedures for dealing with alarms, which can
be demonstrated in Figure 2.

As shown, Alarm Management System and service is not a one-time project; it is a redesign/reengineering and a life-long process. Therefore the performance of the alarm system is continuously
being improved and optimized.
Alarm Philosophy Development
The Modern Alarm Philosophy is introduced to plant operations. The alarm philosophy is the
collection of guiding principles and targets by which users configure alarms and measure alarm
performance. Most philosophies cover the following criteria at a minimum:
1. What is an alarm?
2. How are priorities set based on criticality and time to respond?
3. General alarm considerations, e.g., how to deal with BAD I/O alarms?
4. Alarm performance criteria and resolution activities?
Most plants do not have a robust Alarm Philosophy. All alarms are defined on an ad hoc basis. This
is the root cause of most alarm problems. An effective Alarm Philosophy outlines key concepts and
governing rules for alarm strategy, e.g., what constitutes an alarm and what risk categories pertain to
your site operations. It outlines roles and responsibilities, change management procedures and
project goals, such as target alarm rates.

Alarm Analysis
The Alarm Analysis module identifies potential areas for alarm system performance improvement.
This module automatically collects configuration data, alarm messages and the operator action
journal from the DCS. The data can be automatically captured and imported without any manual
intervention. Main Analysis includes:
1. Alarm System Performance (Alarms per Time Period, Frequent Alarms, Chattering Alarms,
Priority Distribution, Alarm Summary, etc.)
2. Alarm System Settings (Alarms Set by Priority, Disabled/Inhibited Alarms, etc.)
3. Process Changes (Alarm Enable States, Alarm Priorities, etc.)
The results of the analysis reports can be used to improve and monitor alarm system performance.
Performance Metrics Manager
This module enables business personnel at all levels to make informed and timely decisions by
providing timely and accurate access to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
The Performance Metrics Manager provides comparable metrics through benchmarking and
normalization for alarms and operator interactions independent of control systems and database
formats.
Report Manager
This module is a report mechanism. Report sections may be created from specific components and
then included in a report that may be scheduled for automatic execution and publishing. In addition,
each report execution may trigger an e-mail notification that can be customized to any number of email recipients.
Real-Time Alarm Viewer
This module provides real-time viewing of alarm messages from the alarm system on any authorized
client PC connected to the Alarm Management Server. For Foxboro I/A Series systems, the alarms
are collected from one or more printer ports on a Foxboro I/A workstation. A serial to Ethernet
converter is used to send the alarm messages on a LAN to the Alarm Management Server. This is the
same LAN used for transferring data for statistical analysis.
The alarm messages can be sorted and filtered in any column to facilitate analysis and make the
elimination of alarm printers possible.
Advanced Alarm Management
This module provides more enhanced alarm functions for the DCS alarm system to reduce Alarm
Floods:
1. Alarm Shelving
2. Grouped Alarms
3. AlarmPriority Reduction

4. Alarm Load Shedding

5. Pattern Recognition
6. Alarm Suppression (Redundant Voted Alarms, Eclipsing Alarms, etc.)
Alarm Suppression provides significant benefits in removing standing alarms when a plant unit is
shut down, provided that the meaning of shut down is clearly understood. If inventory has been
removed as part of the shutdown process and the equipment is fully isolated, then suppression of all
the alarms is likely to be appropriate.
However, if the plant may restart on short notice, with key inventories in place, then there will be a
number of alarms that should not be suppressed during a plant shut down. In addition, in batch
industries like pharmaceutical plants, alarm setpoints or whether an alarm is configured typically
change depending on the batch phase. If it is not part of the automation, it may generate alarm
floods. Similarly, alarm conditions may change during different recipes, which may also result in
alarm floods. State-based alarm techniques are used in these situations to suppress those alarm
floods.
Safety

Environment

Production loss

Minor
release Significant
inside boundary release
inside
boundary
Non-spared
Non-spared
equipment trip
equipment will
trip

Lower
efficiency
increased
fouling
Pump damage Pump damage Damage
to
(spare on hand) (no spare)
major equipment
likely
< $ 50k
$ 50 to 100k
>$100k

Downtime more
than

Minor

Moderate

Major

Extreme

High
Low
Low

High
High

Emergancy
Emergancy

Low

High

Critical
Critical
Critical

Equipment damage
Inefficient
operation
Consequence
urgency
Now (< 5 min)
Next (5 to 5min)
Latter (> 5 min )

Safety shower Potential fatality

out of service
or worse
Notifiable
release

Critical
equipment
destroy
-

Here the colour of the LED indicates the stage of criticalness. These critical conditions are divided
into four parts: Minor, Moderate, Major and Extreme.
The colour coding is described below:
1) Magenta it is indicate the extreme critical condition and its alarm system is designed in a
such way that though one have pass the acknowledge signal it will continuously giving audio
alarm and when the required action is take place after that it will goes in the relax mode.

2) Red it is indicate the Major critical condition and its acknowledgement system designed in
such a way that there is some time duration after the acknowledgement signal passed so that
one can take action within that time if the action could not take place in given time its start
the alarm again.
3) Yellow it is indicate the moderate critical condition and show the little bit high condition.
4) Crayn it is indicate the minor critical condition and when the minor situation is occurred at
that time this LED will glow.
Human and Ergonomic factor
The study of people and their relationship with the environment around them is called ergonomics.
The application of measurement to products, in order to improve their human use, is called
ergonomic.
Alarm systems alert operators to plant conditions, such as deviation from normal operating limits and
to abnormal events, which require timely action or assessment. Alarms are thus key sources of
information to the operator in maintaining safety. It is important that alarm systems are well designed
and should be used correctly.
Alarm handling (or alarm management) is an issue for any site or process where there is claimed
reliance on human response to an alarm in order to control major accident hazards. If there are too
many safety critical alarms (i.e. more than 20) then the balance is likely to be too far towards reliance
on the operators.

There should be a clear link from the site alarm philosophy to major accident hazard risk
assessments.
Alarm systems need continuous management and improvement in particular, there should
be a good link between modification/change processes and alarms.
Alarm management is primarily a design issue; trying to put matters right later is much more
difficult.
Alarms should direct the operators attention towards plant conditions requiring timely
assessment or action
Every alarm should be useful and relevant to the operator, and have a defined response
The alarm system to accommodate human capabilities and limitations.

Structure of good alarm system

The performance of the alarm system should be assessed during design and commissioning to ensure
that it is usable and effective under all operation conditions. Regular auditing should be continued
throughout plant life to confirm that good performance is maintained.
The following steps should be considered for good alarm system:
Rate of incoming alarms (with priority distribution)
Number of alarms in main list (with priority distribution)
Frequency distribution of alarms: For identifying any "bad actors" that contribute
significantly to the overall alarm load
Operator response times (time before acceptance): Too long or too short response times
indicate that the system is not being used as intended
Benefits
Well-designed alarm systems can help an operator prevent an abnormal situation from escalating or
an upset from occurring. Benefits include:

Increased safety
Reduced environmental incidents
Increased production
Improved quality
Decreased costs

Distributed Control System Reporting

When the plant is located only into the physically small area there are two kind of control system
exist:

1) Centralized Control system :

In which the controller into the field communicate with one or many operator station, each for
different levels, but the disadvantage is that by failure of the controller, by any fail into the plant,
whole plant fail.
Because of that the use of this kind of control system is limited to only small plants.
2) Distributed Control System :
To overcome the major disadvantage of CCS a network of many distributed communicable
controllers is formed. For each controller use in different level of plant have individual operator
station and they can share the information to each other through the network. This arrangement is
call distributed control system.
In DCS reporting play very important roll to understand the performance & monitoring of the whole
plant.
1) Alarm Reporting, Type Of Alarm Generated & Acceptance Of Alarm
With data reporting another reporting is very important is alarm reporting. Data reporting only give
the information about the past and current values of parameters into the plant but with this it is very
important to ensure that there is nothing going wrong into the plant or the plant is not about to fall in
any undesired or hazardous condition. So to ensure the plant working into the safe zone alarm
reporting is necessary into most of plants.
Types of the alarm system are as following:
Process Alarms:
These alarms may be to do with efficiency of the process or indicate defects in the equipment. This
type of alarm is normally incorporated into the plant control system (typically a DCS) and shares the
same sensors as the control system.
Machinery or Equipment Alarms:
These alarms assist with detection of problems with equipment and do not directly affect the
operation of the process.
Safety Related Alarms:
These alarms are used to alert operators to a condition that may be potentially dangerous or
damaging for the plant. Such alarms should normally have a high priority and where they are
involved in protecting against mal-operation by the control system they should be independent of the
devices they are monitoring. In many cases these alarms are generated by the safety shutdown
system itself.
Shutdown Alarms:
This type of alarm tells the operator that an automatic shutdown event has been reached and has been
initiated by the SIS.
Fire (e.g. Satellite Instrument House)
Spill or toxic release
Safety shower
Power system fault
Electrical room or Substation smoke detector
2) Different Type Of Logs & Report Which Can Be Configured On DCS

The ability of DCS to generate logs & reports is nearly unlimited. Any data input to DCS and any
data processed by DCS can be put in a programmed format and printed out on demand ,
automatically on the occurrence of a predetermined event or periodically at a time designated by the
operator.
Types of Logs:
Periodic Log:
Automatic printed out daily or at fixed interval.
Contains data consenting the performance of unit in the recent period.
Data may be instantaneous, averaged or value accumulated in period.

Figure 2.1 Example of Periodic logs

Trend Log:
Print selected group of data at predetermined interval.
Used to follow the trend of set of related operating parameters.
It is used in the place to replace of the traditional multi point recorders.

Figure 2.2 Example of Trend logs

Sequence of Event Log:

Give the information of state of input and output trip.
Is used in by station operating personnel view.

Figure 2.3 Example of Sequential log

Post Trip Review Log:
Continuously collect selected analog points for the period immediately before and after a unit
trip or a similar action occurs.
Event Log:
Is defines the step by step action taken by operator.
3) Data History Use In Logs, Reporting & Trend Display
This logs, reports & trend are very important in DCS for:
Proper understanding of plant as well as the system.
To improve the plant & the system and to make the system & plant stabilize.
To optimize the raw material.
Some kind of problem that we cant recognize at the time it happens we clearly understood
from the history.