Empower Your Building Services with Pipeline SCADA Alarm Management

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so here's the agenda for this morning talk a little bit about the 18.2 standard that some of you may be familiar with then talked through the seven-step process with Pas that it's developed to implement the standard as well as talk about some of the alarm system performance targets so that as you listen to the call you can Benchmark kind of industry expectations of what the uh well performing alarm system would look like so with that if we go to the the next slide it talks about the 18.2 standard in 2003 Isa began developing an alarm management standard this uh this was done by dozens of contributors from a variety of Industries and they spent literally thousands of hours participating in the development of this standard PES volunteered and participated both as a section editor and a voting member of this standard after about six years of development and in 2009 that was uh standard was released it's now accessible via the ISA website that's .a.org you know the basic intent of uh 18.2 is to improve safety ineffective alarm systems have uh often been documented as contributing factors in major process incidents the alarm problems that 18.2 addresses have been well known and in industry for a number of decades as these standards are developed intentionally describe minimum acceptable standards and not necessarily Optimum standards by Design they focus on the what to do rather than the how to implement Isa does not contain specific proven methodologies or detailed work practices the standard focuses both uh work PR on work process requirements these are the shs in in the standard and recommendations which are the should for Effective alarm management we'll cover the shells a little bit later in the presentation if we look at ISA and how does it apply to you I think in a short answer the answer is yes the focus of 18.2 is on alarm systems that are part of modern control systems such as a DCS or skate a plc's or even even separate safety instrument and systems it applies to plants with operators that respond alarms depicted on computer type screens or enunciators specifically this includes the bulk of all processing Industries anywhere from petrochemical to refining to spec specialty chemical pipelines power Pharma uh Mining and metal so it's really all over the all over the industry additionally it applies to different modes of operation so whether your process is continuous or batch or semi batch the ISA 18.2 applies this is is really because this is a function of specific people interacting with computers as opposed to the process that you're necessarily involved in controlling so it's it's really a human factors issue so that's why it has such broad applicability as far as the regulatory impact of 18.2 the important thing here to understand is that the Regulatory Agencies have a general duty clause and interpretations as example if you if you look at ocean 1910 1119 um one subsection D3 uh 2 would state if the employer shall document equipment complies with recognized and generally accepted good engineering practices This Acronym is called regag Gap uh and regag GAP and that is that is used extensively so so there's a little question um whether 8 18.2 is an is is an example of regag Gap it really does and companies should expect the Regulatory Agencies to take notice uh generally a regulated industry uh can be expected either to comply with regag gap or explain that they're doing something just as good as better so it's really a minimum uh performance expectation and you know indeed uh OSHA has sought and received permission from Isa to internally distribute 18.2 to its in spectors um this was this was done with the specific intent to be able to easily site its in investigations um and for enforcement so it's uh you can expect to see it quite widely here are some examples of of regulatory impact um it it applies all over the industry both um IEC is is moving this to a global standard fza which um is in the pipeline management system is aggressively pursuing the adoption of API 1167 so that is uh that is a a huge issue these days in pipeline industry um and at the bottom of the slide here you can see a few uh special emphasis findings U from the from the uh OSHA that cites regag Gap as in citations here's an example of some of the human factors issues um that have to do with uh being cited in in chemical safety board um incidents basically that the the human factors around the alarm systems and the DCS interface are absolutely uh critical and you can be expected uh for inspectors in incident investigations to routinely look for these so as far as the FDA and where is the FDA with um with 18.2 um the federal agencies were advised to incorporate these standards back in 1998 and and the FDA as one of those agencies has uh marched down that path so the uh the pharmaceutical industry in the current good manufacturing practices the the cgmp addresses um addresses abnormal situations those are really sh that's shown on the next slide as a current good manufacturing process they're fundamental um in the Pharma industry uh the C cgmps require abnormal situations to be identified and followed up on but they don't necessarily specify that the use of alarms to identify those abnormal situations what they do have to be followed up on if alarms are used to identify those abnormal situations then their regulatory ex um expect expectations on how those alarms are are being used in the auditing so um that would lead you back to 18.2 this is an example of a uh very unfortunate incident that happened a number of years ago you you may be familiar with it it has to do with the the Texas City Isam explosion where there were a number of fatalities um the alarm system handling uh was specifically cited in in the uh in the document and investigation of this and uh this is another example of Osha using uh regga Gap as a uh as a reference and how how it links to the ISA standards we go on a high level what what an alarm is if you look at 18.2 a lot of work was done to figure out what an alarm actually was and very carefully craft that definition so it's really an audible or visible means of indicating the operator of an equipment malfunction process deviation or abnormal operator condition and the key is requiring a response so in many cases alarms in Industry Legacy alarms were called alarms but they were really informational messages that really didn't require an operator response here alarms are specifically defined to something that requires an operator response so there's confusion an industry over term so we try and use the term alarm very very specifically that would lead us to the to the Pas 7 steps in in 2006 Pas published a book it's called The Alarm management handbook it's available on Amazon and such which provided a proven seven-step methodology for solving an alarm system problem and accomplishing effective alarm management there's really no conflict between this seven-step approach and the 18.2 life cycle methodology they are really the same I me what the p7 steps are that are shown here and that will be followed up on in subsequent webinars marry both the what needs to be done with the how to to implement a highly performing optimized alarm system so if you look at at the next slide that has to do with the 18.2 life cycle stages you you can see these are the stages that life of an alarm system from coming up with an initial philosophy all the way through to audit management of change in in the long-term operation of the alarms you know this is basically a requirement some document structure it's it's not an efficient system to go through and actually do what we would call an alarm rationalization and create the uh create a highly performing alarm system that's what the seven-step process helps lead lead you to do using the 18.2 requirements to implement that system I can transition into the actual mandatory pieces of 18.2 these are the shell elements that um are required so this is an extraction of those elements from 18.2 starts out with an alarm philosophy this is where we have to define the responsibilities and the criteria for creating alarms and then the basis for a prioritization system in many cases there may be three or four priorities uh that alarms have and so that all needs to be defined and laid out in a philosophy document the heavy lifting of of the alarm work really comes in this next step which is alarm rationalization and that is is where you go through each alarm by type in priority and determine the set point the consequences the the cause of the alarm and the corrective actions to really to lead the operator into the critical piece which is when the alarm goes off what actions do I need does he need to take other components of the of the shell parts of 18.2 have to do with training just as in n as in OSHA um 1910 there is operator training that has to occur um so people are aware of the alarms and they're trained and how to respond the next slide will cover some additional shell elements these have to do with the testing requirements so what does it take to test the alarm system and how often is that done how are alarms depicted on the HMI that that's the human machine interface are there Provisions for shelving shelving is a specifically defined term that tells you how to take an alarm out of service to not flood the operator with alarms the performance requirements these are the targets as far as what an alarm system should be performing against in terms of a well-managed alarm system and of course anoc process for handling both changing the alarm settings and in cases of disabling those and how do you document that the next slide we'll will'll dig into the alarm system performance targets if you look at these in terms of alarms per day per operator it will show you how kind of Benchmark you in terms of what a a well performing alarm system is so I won't go through all of the slides but or all of the the values but if you look at on the third line there as far as enunciated alarms per controller position this is in reference to a pipeline industry where an operator in a petrochemical plant is equivalent to a controller in in a uh in a finza or in a pipeline business that's about 150 alarms per day per controller or per operator so you can start to look at at what that is and sense you know I I typically use a rule of thumb here if if an operator is is running a 12-hour shift that's about you know that's about 10 alarms per hour so it's it's a fairly silent control room which is a which is not a lot of alarm so you can recognize when you walk into a control room like that because you'll it tends to be very quiet very calm type of a control room there are a number of other definitions in here in performance targets that will be expanded upon in subsequent webinars if we look at just a couple other aspects of 18.2 the next slide will introduce a couple of Concepts just kind of for your awareness very quickly one is alarm system classification and this is is not a prioritization system so this is not the emergency high low type of alarm priority that you may typically be used to but it has is more of an administrative function in terms of keeping track of alarms so things that uh you know for alarms for example how often do you have to do refresher training so those are the types of things that an alarm classification system is at Pas we recommend keeping it very simple um and not having an a very elaborate uh classification system essentially there are no specific required classifications in 18.2 nor are there any minimum number of classifications that need to be defined it's really that if you elect to have a classification this is um it outlines requirements for managing that the next slide will take that one step further and these have to do with highly managed alarms there is a 18.2 specifically sites these out there's no requirement to have these alarms in any class so it's not a requirement to actually have them but if you do designate them there are some very uh prescriptive things that need to be done Pas recommends is if you do have a few very important alarms you might want to call them set up a separate class but not necessarily call them highly managed alarms because that brings with it some other requirements here's kind of the punchline we'd like to Hope help people avoid getting to know Mr Jones and Mr Smith um I know they're only there to help you but uh we'd like' like to a help you avoid having to know them really well so in summary poorly performing systems are widely understood in in in industry it's known as a contributing factor to many accidents and poor operating and what 18.2 defining the the what and the alarm management handbook defining the how to implement 8 18.2 can really do some alarm system management and really help create a very highly performing alarm system and guide The Operators to effective use of that alarm system the operator UI or the HMI is is also very important we don't have time to dwell upon that in this in this introductory webinar about how the information is presented is also extremely important so the next steps from here this is the last slide in the presentation I'll remind everyone at the top of your screen there'll be a little Q&A bar where you can type a question in and then Folks at novatech can see that question and we can uh spend the next few minutes doing a Q&A as Gan had mentioned in the beginning of the presentation Kevin's contact information is shown below here and what we'd like to do is you know either a complimentary analysis of your alarm system history files to look at what may be going on certainly novatech and PAs are welcome to do an on-site demo of the uh The Joint Solution that's been developed and also there's a white paper that's available that if we uh if you contact Uh Kevin he can certainly get to you so with that I I think we'll open it up for any questions and I think the the best way to do that would be turn it over to Jan to see if what questions have come in we did get a question on whether these slides would be available or could be mailed out and instead what we're doing is we're actually recording this webinar series and they will all be available from the novatech website so if you wait a few hours or day we'll have this uh this webinar and all the subsequent webinars posted on the website okay another question is can I use the PSS tools on both DCS and PLC systems and the answer is that yes you can we do have it integrated with the D3 to be able to analyze alarm history files and the configuration to come up with the analytical reports on alarm management but those same tools have been applied to Honeywell systems Ovation and various uh PLC systems so this is not just something that you can use with the D3 although we are um integrating in to a certain extent with the D3 if if anyone had any other questions if you had submitted them we're just going to wrap up then okay the the next the next webinar is going to be at 10:30 a.m Eastern Time on Wednesday February 29th and it's going to cover the first three steps of that seven-step alarm management process as I said the um links to the recordings of the webinars are going to be available on the on the website and also information about the the series of webinars is there on the novatech novatech process website so thank you all for joining us and we look forward to continuing this webinar series with you in the future