Q: How is Alarm and Event Analysis different from Honeywell’s Alarm Scout?A: Alarm Scout is a service offering that collects alarm and event data from the user’s site, ships it to a centralized server, and returns reports on alarms and events to site personnel. AEA collects the data, analyzes it on the site, sends reports, and also allows staff to dig into the data immediately. This is achieved by making reports available on the Web, at which time the customer’s view of the data can be adjusted to answer additional questions. AEA also retains the data as long as needed, limited only by storage requirements. This allows the user to analyze a given point in time after the fact. Finally, AEA also works with Alarm Configuration Manager to enable analysis of statistics for alarm enforcement activities.
Q: How does the customer know which application to choose?A: If the customer does not require the ability to dig into the data himself, does not need to keep the data for an extended period, and does not wish to analyze ACM enforcement activities, Alarm Scout will serve his needs. If the customer requires those added capabilities, AEA is the natural choice.
Q: What kinds of analyses of ACM enforcement activities are provided?A: Basically, AEA provides (under the title “exceptions summary”) the number of: enforcement sessions and exceptions, the average exceptions per session, the number of suspend overrides, the average suspend overrides, the number of enforce overrides and the average enforce overrides per session. So, essentially, users get an indication of how stable their alarm configuration is and whether their operators are tending to allow it to be returned to the engineered configuration.
Q: What other metrics are provided?A: ACM provides metrics including counts of alarms, counts of alarms per 10 minutes/hour/shift, maximum alarms per 10 minutes, median alarm rate, duration, time to acknowledge, standing alarms, stale alarms, disabled and inhibited alarms, repeating alarms, and distribution by priority. It also provides statistics on process changes. The ability for a site to create additional reports is also provided.
Q: How does AEA collect the data?A: AEA collects the data from the History Module or the Event Journal Collector for TPS, and from the Experion PKS Alarm and Event database. Third-party collection can be added in varying ways depending on the capability of the control system.
Q: How do users schedule reports?A: Users can employ the report scheduling capability to select one of the existing reports (as delivered by Honeywell or as defined by the site) to be executed periodically, the time to execute the report (daily, weekly, monthly, the start and stop date for executing the scheduled report, and the time of day to execute it) and a distribution list to which to send the report. The user creates the distribution lists. With R200, users can select to have an Excel copy of the report attached to the e-mail. This requires an SMTP server accessible to the AEA server.