Ensuring Safe Production by Suppressing Alarms

摘要

Commissioning and starting an industrial facility is costly and complex. While a new refinery built in the 1970's had only 2000 instruments, a similar modern facility has five to ten times as many. To cope with this growing complexity, automation professionals increasingly rely on control strategy templates. This delivers manageable control systems to Operations to help them run the plant in a safe and cost effective way. Despite the increase in the use of templates, alarm suppression designs have often not followed this approach. This case study takes a look at the alarm management problems at an industrial complex through a significant capacity expansion and follows the deployment of alarm suppression strategies developed from templates.