Honeywell’s advanced alarm management products help to protect plant uptime and safety by reducing losses caused by ineffective alarming. By reducing the number of alarms that require operator intervention, operators are more effective. In addition, time and effort are reduced to develop, deploy, and maintain an alarm system when Abnormal Situation Management (ASM) Consortium best practices are followed.

An effective alarm management program is critical to minimizing the number and impact of abnormal situations. Honeywell’s alarm management solutions combine extensive alarm system features provided in Experion^® PKS with applications offering industry-leading features, a Six-Sigma-based work process for managing your alarm system, services to assist you in using the software, and work process to ensure that you have an effective alarm system.

An abnormal situation occurs when a disturbance in a process causes plant operations to deviate from its normal operating state to such an extent that human intervention is required. The inability to diagnose and control abnormal situations has an estimated economic impact of at least $10 billion annually in the U.S. petrochemical industry alone, based on research by the Honeywell-led ASM Consortium.

Adopting a consistent alarm management philosophy is a key element of abnormal situation management since abnormal situations frequently inundate operators with alarms, thereby complicating their daily duties of operating the plant. Operators must deal daily with a real-time, highly complex, dynamic environment. A good alarm system quickly provides appropriate information to operators—helping them identify the cause and restore the plant to normal operations.

Implementing alarm management tools provide the following benefits:

• Constraint-driven alarm configuration management helps ensure alarms are always consistent with fundamental plant constraints

• Auxiliary notification provides reminders to operators and other plant personnel without cluttering the alarm system

• An event analysis tool assists in quickly identifying cause and effect relationships

• Analysis of alarm and event activity metrics identifies alarm system problems and performance, as well as operator workload.