Management of Alarm Systems

1
Management of Alarm Systems

• Current State and Direction for Alarm Management
  Guidelines

2
SP18 Management of Alarm Systems

• Standards Practices 18 Committee (SP18)
• Began new scope in Oct 2003 on 18.2
• Effort will likely produce a standard and other
  documents
• Purpose
• Define the terminology
• Show processes for effective implementation
• Include processes for the entire lifecycle
• Scope
• Alarm hardware is excluded (S18.1)
• Process sensors and final control elements are
  excluded
• Safety instrumented systems are excluded except
  for the alarms generated from SIS systems
• Process data and event data are excluded

3
SP18 Committee

• Team Members

4
Definitions

• SP18 Definitions
• alarm
• An audible or visible means of indicating to the
  operator an equipment or process malfunction or
  abnormal condition requiring an action.
• alarm management
• The processes and practices for determining,
  documenting, designing, monitoring, and
  maintaining alarm systems.
• alarm system
• The collection of hardware and software that
  detects an alarm state, transmits the indication
  of that state to the operator, and records the
  transmission.

5
Life Cycle Model

6
SP18 Status and Summary

• In October 2003 SP18 began working on a new alarm
  management standard, S18.02.
• New members were recruited to the committee,
  which now has representatives from many users,
  PAS vendors, and alarm management software
  vendors.
• The objective is to build on the work of EEMUA
  and Namur to generate a useful standard for
  users.
• The committee is on schedule to sent a draft to
  ballot in 2006.
• The draft includes a life cycle model which has
  good feedback from users.