PHOENIX, August 02, 2010 – Process safety and environmental impact took center stage at the Abnormal Situation Management (ASM) Consortium’s 2010 Quarterly Review Meeting, held at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Members of the consortium – which include a wide range of industrial manufacturers, vendors, and universities that collaborate to research best practices for managing abnormal situations in industrial facilities – gathered for the week-long event to discuss current research and development activities. The meeting, hosted by consortium members UCLA and Human Centered Solution, is a platform for the members to share the benefits gained from ASM practices and products, and to discuss new challenges faced in plant operations.
“The incident in the Gulf of Mexico has heightened the fact that process safety, if ignored, can lead to abnormal situations with costly and disruptive consequences,” said Peggy Hewitt, ASM Consortium director. “Minimizing the impact of incidents such as this one involves addressing all three of the potential causal areas; process, equipment and people. The ASM Consortium improves process safety, reliability and efficiency in process plants by bringing together plant experience, with human factors engineering and the latest innovative technologies.
Other topics covered at the June quarterly review meeting included: alarm management continuous improvement project, identifying ASM competencies, interactions requirements analysis, visualization of valve information for operators, alarm management solutions and implementation of procedural automation.
Background on the ASM Consortium
The Honeywell-led ASM Consortium started in 1994 to address customer concerns about the high cost of incidents at their plants such as unplanned shutdowns, fires, explosions, emissions, etc, and this was termed Abnormal Situation Management®. An injection of funding from NIST enabled the consortium to spend several years researching and developing highly-advanced concepts to address the problem of abnormal situations. Since then, research has continued and increasing effort has been put into development and deployment of ASM solutions that incorporate ASM knowledge.
The basis of the ASM Consortium is collaboration and information-sharing. By working together, members achieve far more than they could working alone. Research results are published for members, and often further shared by means of webinars, seminars and workshops. User members also guide Honeywell in selection and development of product solutions that incorporate ASM knowledge. Non-members can benefit from ASM Research as ASM Best Practices Guidelines for Alarm Management, Display Design and Procedural Practices are available for purchase on Amazon.com.
Current ASM Consortium members include: BP, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Sasol, Total, Shell, Honeywell, HCS, UCLA, MaryKay O’Connor Process Safety Center at Texas A&M, NTU, and Penn State.
ASM® is a registered trademark of Honeywell International Inc.