Pipeline scada alarm management for Customer Support

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we welcome everyone who has joined us today for the sixth and final webinar in the webinar series entitled alarm management Essentials presented by novitec and our strategic partner pas today's webinar alarm management from the operator's perspective will be recorded and posted on the novitec website if you are unable to attend the previous webinars you can view all of them on our website at .novatechweb.com to access the recorded webinars click on the alarm management menu item under the process tab from our home page we are joined today by Joe shingara responsible for novatech product marketing and Senior system engineer Chris corleoris I now turn the webinar over to Joe who will provide a brief summary of the previous five presentations okay thanks Caroline we'll move right into the presentation we've got about a 30 to 45 minute webinar here for you we're going to cover a lot of information and actually talk about how the system is used with our D3 product and provide a live demo so novatec partnered with Pas in effort to make the ISA 18.2 standard feasible for our customers the Pas plant State Suite platform offers the ability to effectively manage alarms and effectively Implement a strategy related to the ISA 18.2 standard the plant State Suite platform also offers pnid and multi-variable control optimization Solutions why Pas and novitec novitec provides approximately 30 years of process control and automation experience and PAs is a recognized leader in the field of alarm management and together we feel like that combination provides a very strong partnership with respect to delivering solutions to our customers plant State Suite solution is compatible and we've gone through a lot of effort to make it completely integrated into our D3 DCS system it's also flexible and can be used on many other VCS platforms including many of our competitors and and several PLC Solutions and we've actually implemented these Solutions novatec has actually implemented Pas Solutions with both our D3 DCS and some of our competitor systems the novitec PCS solution it's important to note that the solution can be implemented across an entire Enterprise and not just on a single control system solution and Chris is going to demonstrate some of that as we go through the presentation so today's agenda we're going to basically do a very brief review of the first five sessions we're going to look at the D3 PSS connectivity how we actually connect the plant State Suite product to the D3 we'll do the live demo including the configuration analysis and visualization and then we'll take questions at the end so the webinar series that we're talking about was designed to provide a comprehensive view of how you would Implement an alarm management solution based on the ISA 18.2 standard we're going to dive into a little bit of what each of these sessions were and then look at the actual practical approach of using the plant State Suite so the first session talked about the actual 18.2 standard and talked about the need for an effective and alarm management strategy and the most basic need is the fact that I need to operate my plant safely and and the fact is that most systems most DCS systems out there today and most control systems that were implemented throughout the 80s and 90s have a have an over abundance of alarms and the systems tend to fail the operator in the most critical need during abnormal situations due to things like alarm floods or ineffective alarm strategies so the ISA um have has developed the 18.2 standard to address those needs so the standard was uh begun in 19 in 2003 and actually released in 2009 and it provides guidelines for what an effective alarm management strategy is it provides the what it tells the reader what is required to actually implement this strategy and it talks about developing an alarm philosophy identifying bad actor alarms doing rationalization of alarms doing detailed design implementation operation and then monitoring the management monitoring the change of those alarms and Performing routine audits so it's sort of the what it doesn't tell you how to do anything it sort of tells you what you need to do to to implement this strategy the nice thing about Pas is they've not only addressed the what but they actually have addressed the how so their implementation philosophy actually talks about what is required and how you would actually develop an effective an alarm management strategy and their tools in the plant State Suite allow a user to actually implement it in a very concise uh and optimal sort of way uh the basic philosophy is that if it doesn't call for an operator response then it shouldn't be an alarm in the first session we've introduced the plant State Suite product it's a comprehensive Suite of tools that allows customers to implement an effective alarm management strategy with respect to alarm and event analysis documentation and rationalization alarm audit and enforce Dynamic alarming alert director and also the loop loop analysis and loop optimization so it's a very comprehensive product that allows the customer to really develop what we think is a very effective strategy with respect to alarms moving on to webinar two we actually Dove down into a couple of the aspects of the seven step process particularly talking about developing an alarm philosophy collecting data and benchmarking your systems and Performing bad actor resolution webinar 3 then moved along to steps four and five talking about documentation and rationalization and the alarm audit and force technology during this session we talked heavily about how you would develop those teams it's very important that a customer considers during the documentation and rationalization developing a team to actually do this work the team would typically include a facilitator board operators process control Engineers safety and health environmental representatives and representatives from reproduction and maintenance engineering teams talking about the audit and enforcement capability of plant State Suite once you've once you've made gains in the fact that in in your alarm activities once you've reduced the number of alarms in your plant in this case we're reducing from 3 500 to a thousand we don't want to allow for creeping of those alarms back up to unacceptable levels so webinar number two talked about the ability to manage those alarms and audit and enforce the fact that these will that the alarms need to stay within a controlled sustained level people would ask okay what what sorts of things would actually cause that alarm creep well imagine if you have new projects going on in your plant you have contractors working in your plant you have your own employees working in your plant implementing new projects well those people will have a tendency to add alarms without doing the proper rationalization anytime you would have an accident or accident review boards in your plant operators using alarms as reminders so all kinds of activities can result in an alarm scope creep if you will so that webinar talked about how to manage that and how to how to deal with that in a proper way webinar four then went on talking about the real-time alarm management aspects and controlling and maintaining your improved system it talked about the plant State Suite Master database and how you use that Master database to perform audit and enforce functionality alarm shelving Dynamic alarm management and how you tie that all together into a concise and appropriate system for your plant webinar 5 then moved on to the plant State Suite Loop analysis tool whereby we talked about monitoring all of the control loops in your plant being able to schedule data collections through our OPC server and deliver that information through the plant State Suite product and allow that plant State sweet product to perform analysis on that data talked about how the plant State Suite performed automatic assessment using 70 different analyzes tools and then providing one condensed industry index to allow the users to visualize which Loops are not performing properly and then it talked about actually providing an overview of all the loops in your plant and developing scheduled reports that allow you that allow you to understand how your Loops are operating in your plant we talked about the development of the control Loop performance index and how the data is passed through the alarm from the DCS system into the PSS system to create a response and accessibility index and a service index which then results in a control Loop performance index plant State Suite offers a a large number of tools to to facilitate visualization and optimization of your control loops within your plant and I think that was pretty much all we covered in the first five sessions so what I wanted to do now is move on to today's session and talk about okay how do we actually connect the plant State suite and how do we actually use the plant State Suite with a D3 system so on the screen right now what I have is a typical D3 system with a couple of PCMS some i o and a number of operator workstations and the first thing that you really need to ensure when you're installing plant State Suite on a D3 system is that you you need to know that you're going to connect the plant State Suite to our what we call our configuration server or our cdcm and on that cdcm we need to be running an OPC server to allow connected connectivity of the plant State Suite server so we're gonna we're gonna add a plant State Suite server to the backbone network of the D3 and we're going to connect that um we're going to connect that plant State Suite server with two connections to our D3 DCs and the first connection is a custom driver that we wrote that allows the plant State Suite database to be created so what we can do is import all of our alarm history file data and our configuration configuration data our tag data from all the PCMS on the system with a single click of a button and we can import that information into the plant State Suite product and create the tag database necessary to do all this analysis this driver also facilitates changes in the tag database so for example if you added a tag or removed a tag or change the parameters of a tag this data is picked up automatically by the plant State Suite product secondly we have an OPC connection we need the OPC connection to the D3 DCS to allow access direct access to our process controllers or our PCMS that facilitates the real-time alarm management that's necessary for alarm shelving audit and and force and dynamic alarm management uh lastly I'd like to point out that once you have the connection to the plant State Suite server then all of the normal boxes that are on the D3 Network can become plant State Suite clients so you'll see through Chris's demonstration how you can use data from the plant State Suite server to visualize your alarms and analyze your alarms on any of the boxes that typically reside on the D3 system so current status we've we've implemented this in approximately 10 plants now it facilitates the creation of an alarm philosophy actually doing alarm analysis badactor resolution documentation and rationalization and audit and enforce we're doing this today at a number of plants we're currently implementing our alarm shelving with the plant State suite and the dynamic alarm management we've made some really nice enhancements to the D3 system to help facilitate these last two items whereby we've changed our D3 database structures and our OPC server to facilitate granular alarm inhibiting and granular alarm shelving so for example instead of inhibiting an entire epn's alarms you can now inhibit the high high alarm the low low alarm the rate of change alarm and so forth in a granular sort of way and this allows the plant State Suite product to allows the user to shelve those individual alarms and allows the dynamic alarm management package to act on those individual alarms rather than on an EPN or a tag in general so with that I'd like to turn it over to Chris Corley Orris Chris is our senior system engineer and D3 product manager he's been with Nova tech for about 11 years in the engineering World he's he's co-authored a number of our products including our part of our Flex batch products part of our paperless procedures products and so forth and he's currently heavily involved in r d activities related to our D3 version 14.1 release so with that we'll turn it over to Chris all right Joe thank you for that introduction first and foremost I'm just going to start at the beginning and I'll go through the configuration I'll go through the alarm and event analysis the documentation of rationalization audit and force and we'll look at the controller performance analysis as well you know we'll just give you an idea a great idea of how everything plays together and how integrated this software is with the D3 so here I'm launching our plant State Suite software PSS software is more of an engineering style display and I'm just going to go into configuration Joe showed you a nice picture of what it looks like here I'm just going to enforce it with where everything's at and how data actually is is populated into the database and how integrated everything is so here I'm showing uh one data owner so this is our current marketing 2 system we could have multiple data owners as well so we can talk to any other PLC Solutions or other DCS Solutions we can bring it in so from one common interface we can look at all the alarms across your Enterprise here for my data connection I only have one right now to my D3 system I have a point configuration file which is just pointing to our cdb information and basically we point to the information we run it and then the plant statesuite database has all the information and tag information and OPC connections and and everything gets pulled into the data source then we have our event configuration which just pulls in our alarm history files and manages that so it matches the point configuration with what's actually going on into the system and there's mechanisms to help you manage that currently right now we have that information pulled in on a daily basis but that's configurable so here I have it scheduled you know every day at 1am it's going to go through and it's going to collect new information put it in the database make it available for reporting and keep up to date with the current information for my system from a real-time perspective we have OPC as our main mechanism so here just showing that we connect to multiple OPC servers and manage that communication one thing that's nice about the OPC communication is that there's throttle capabilities in order to manage you know how much we're reading and writing and you know manage that that connection there's also the ability to connect to Pi servers so many of our customers use OSI Pi software if OPC is is used for something else you can bypass it go to your Pi server and the plant States wheat software pulls from The OSI Pi on a real-time basis and we can get to Point data that way so there's a lot of options and a lot of things as far as connecting to various sources I'm just going to show you what the tag.parameters look like once everything is imported in and I'm not going to dwell on it a lot but I just want to show you that once you pull the information in everything is automatically populated for you so the different tags the fields that are important and really the thing to note is all the OPC addresses are already configured automatically for me so I don't have to do any mapping whatsoever it also goes through and if something's a PID block or a you know if the block is block one two three four you know it's smart parsing so so it all it all does that for you so it's very easy to configure the system and once once you pull that configuration in the system really takes care of itself and uh it's it's pretty sharp and pretty integrated so once the system is configured we're reading in alarm information uh we'll just walk in and start step two and three of the seven step process and go into the alarm and event analysis so I'm just going to go to my applications alarm and event analysis and a window pops up telling me what kind of analysis do you want to do right now these are pre-configured analysis and and these are out of the box slicing and dicing of the data and I can just choose you know to show me certain things like frequent alarms duplicate alarms chattering alarms you know anything really alarm system related I can look at settings wise set alarm set by priority by type you know disabled and inhibited alarms and also really neat because in the event files process data is there as well I can look at process related things like controller modes and set points and and things like that that sort of thing is helpful because you know you can manage then you know our operators how are they really operating the plant do they keep are they bypassing PID controllers and just changing outputs and you know you get a good picture of what's going on in your plan so I'll just select frequent alarms just to show you what the displays look like so here as soon as I popped it up it's showing me a graph of these are the top 10 alarms right now in my system for the past 30 days and once again these are pre-configured reports but you can set them up to however you want this chart it's real time so here I have my first alarm I can go in and expand the information and I can see really you know the granular data of when it happened the chart on the right hand side is a dynamic chart where I can do some analysis on it as well so here are my top 10 alarms it's a simulated system so everything is it's not indicative of really what it would be like in a plant but if I press the accumulation percent button I can come in and I can see that these top 10 alarms are accounting for 49 of the alarms on this simulation system one nice feature about this display as well is I can come in and I can customize the view so I can see the top 20 or top top 10 or top five or whatever it's a real-time chart npas does a really good job of providing you with ways of going in and visualizing the data in different perspectives going 3D and there's a lot of nice features for visualization from a client perspective we want to be able to visualize this information but not necessarily go into the plant state state Suite application so for that instance Pas has a web server available to allow you to view and look at the same data so here I just pulled up an Internet Explorer window and I'll go to my favorites and I have a alarm and event analysis page favorited for my system this is going into the the plant State Suite server and it'll pull up a connection without any software installed or anything like that it'll pull up a connection of what's going on in my system one thing that's nice about this is if you can also configure this to make it available to other computers in your Enterprise so managers workstations engineering workstations supervisor this data can be made available to really whoever you'd like so the alarm and event analysis page loaded and here I'm greeted with the same functionality as I had before where I can pull up my precon defined reports so here I can come in and I'll pull up the same frequent alarms so I'll say now between now and the last 30 days I'll submit that search and right away I get that nice graph where I can do my nice analysis and I can look at the same information as what I had before one thing about the the software and the web interface is everything is integrated in so here I'm looking at the here's my nice chart but here's the raw data down here I can come in and press details and once again I can look at all the alarms time stamped from a granular level to see what happened with that alarm I can export it to Excel and uh also what's really neat is once again everything is integrated so if I did documentation and rationalization on the alarm I can click on the different alarms and I can get to different aspects and giving you a complete picture of what's going on in your system so it's just really easy to look at frequent alarms we can look at stale alarms we can look at all these things you know from a web browser and it's just a great great operator interface to the system it's one thing to get at the data and maintain that database and slice and dice but the most important thing are the reports you know how do I visualize what I did and how do I present it in a clear and concise way where people want to look at these reports and understand what's going on and really any display within the Pas software can be made into a report and there's a lot of great reporting capabilities built into it so currently right now I have my frequent alarms uh set up and I'm just going to create a quick on the Fly report so I'll go to my report menu I'll save this View and I'll just call it frequent alarms and then I can go into my report Builder and build that report So currently right now I have my frequent alarms I'll include that into a report I'll name the reports so I'll just name it by system and I'll just do a quick print preview and once again it created a nice PDF style display of of that same report you know with the different metrics that are uh applicable and uh it was just it's really easy to build these nice looking reports with this report they're very flexible so let's say I want to come in and let's say I want to add something to this report so I have frequent alarms let's say I want uh stale alarms so I come in once again I get the display that I want to see at I go to report Builder I'll save I'll call this stale alarms hit OK go back to my report Builder click it I can order it on how I want I can add email information email it to certain places and once again I can preview it and uh you know that that still alarm will be here as well so ordering viewing visualization reporting that is really what I think is the power of the Pas software you know the ability to go out collecting the information slice and dice as you want and also really visualize it in a nice clear and concise way it's just really great for doing that moving on to step four of the pas7 step process we have the documentation and rationalization I'm going to start from an operator's perspective and how we've built it into the system So currently right now I have my total vision graphic up and I have a point that's an alarm so my bk1 tc1 point there's a low low alarm associated with it I have built in a right-click menu where I can click on that point click the low low alarm button and in doing so it's going to launch my documentation and rationalization information for that point so here it really gives you a lot of really nice information for what alarm what's the cause of it what do I need to do to correct it and what are the consequences and of not taking those actions So currently right now I get my approved trip points so what did I rationalize it as my Max response time 15 minutes my cause verification and corrective actions are there and my consequences as well this is a customizable display so I don't have to take just this I can add my own displays but once again it's just really nice that I have one click access to documentation and rationalization information from the system to build that documentation rationalization is really really easy and I'll just go through building something real quickly here I have a low alarm for PC Master if I go back to the Pas software I go to my configuration screen for my Advanced alarm elements and I go to my documentation and rationalization I can come in and right now I have PC Master already pulled up where when I click on it I see all the different alarms that are available for that point so here it's just a matter of it's nicely organized I can come in I can span expand it out I can add certain causes I have pre-configured causes I can type whatever I want in I can add consequences associate tags propose certain trip points so right now it imported in 155 maybe 130 is something I want to propose and approve and I can come in and just really quick quickly come in and approve that point so I'll just give it an Moc number just to document it the documentation and rationalization is complete so when I go back into my total vision graphic right click hit the the button associated with it it'll pop up the screen with uh whatever I put in right now so to go into that information to look at everything on alarm basis it's really easy to get the data in and also make it available instantaneously in the D3 system once I go through and rationalize all the different alarms that I have I can move on to step five which is my audit and force and this will kind of show how everything is integrated within the software and how easy it is to get the different mechanisms to play together so currently we have an audit and enforce Tab and it's going to go out and I actually have that bk1 tc1 point I already have it available to audit and enforce but let's say I want to add that PC Master once again it's really easy it's I right click on it I say add to audit and enforce next time I go in and I refresh that that point is over here as well so it's it's the mechanisms they play together really really nicely so I can move once I rationalize everything then I can make it available to my audit enforce financial management alarm shelving and everything else so here this actually goes in and an audit enforce is really powerful in that so I documented what I want my values to be now I get to go out and see you know has my operators have they been changing those points have they gone through the proper channels to change it and really the the power of this is that I have a master database which I have all my different limits and all my different values and I have the ability to go out search my system on a scheduled basis and pull it and figure out if there are any discrepancies currently right now and I'll show it from an operator interface where here I have a PSS notification bar plant State Suite Out of the Box gives you a notification button where you can put in and get to the different mechanisms for the different components you don't have to have this this is just something that's really nice and there are dynamics behind it and if you're utilizing all the different modules for the plant State Suite it's really nice and it's available for you we're also working with the D3 to build in different components to get at the different aspects of it so for example total vision you know where I don't necessarily have to require a Toolbar to get at the different components and also from instalarm as well we have on our alarm see the information that's required of it and and to do some of the advanced plant State Suite stuff that we we need to do so we're looking to build that into the D3 So currently I have a audit enforce I have a message it's kind of oranged out when I click it it pulls up my uh audit enforce window where I come in and it's saying that bktc one point this 220 point it's saying that the master value is 160. the red system value is 225 and I can come in and confirm and it's writing those values to the OPC server where notice how this went low because the alarm limit changed and it enforced uh what what the value was in the master database if I come in and I force so right now it's on a schedule but I'll just go ahead and audit all so it's going to read the values from the OPC system it says my bk1 pc1 which I just enforced is okay but the PC Master because I gave it something different there's a mismatch associated with it with audit and enforce I can come in and manage how the enforces happen so when I go to the different audit and enforce and I click on the uh enforce type I can see that you know I can just I can do none don't enforce so just tell me if there are any discrepancies I can do confirms which the other one was that it required operation you know operator interaction in order to enforce it or automatic where it'll just do it automatically once the enforce runs there are different options associated with it as well that I can come in and I can do those actions okay so moving on to the control Loop performance analysis this is the seventh step and and we'll just kind of show the configuration just really really quickly and I'm not going to go through configuring anything mostly because a lot of it once you do the import is already configured for you so here I have I'm in the configure Loop analysis page here there are defaults already put in so defaults that you can tweak on variances so noise limits standard deviations thresholds weights so you can assign weights in order to get a better clpi index and order your Loops by importance and once again all OPC information for this Loops are automatically done for you so here I can see that I have you know my different set points my my outputs my you know what the tuning parameters in right now all that's kind of read for you automatically so when I go into the loop analysis application where I can see the different analysis on the different Loops here I just have one Loop running right now which I have a warning if I double click it I can go in and I can see all those statistics that we talked about diagnosis and then the problems so here for this loop I have a large standard deviation that I uh configured in in my error and it gives me corrective actions in plain English I can come in and look at the data that was collected look at the different distributions look at Advanced elements as well Advanced metrics and the important thing is my clpi which I can come in Benchmark my system set up my kpis and quickly look at my different loops and how they're acting with the system one nice thing about the loop analysis status so right now I'm only analyzing one Loop if I want to analyze other Loops everything is already done for you you know so this page right here this Loop analysis status was populated automatically after I did the import once again it's one integrated system that plays together really really nicely that I can come in and just select my different points enable and it'll go ahead and start analyzing putting everything on a schedule to get your system and and to configure it and to get it to a point where you can start monitoring and looking at your different elements you know from your alarm analysis to your Loop analysis as well everything is is pretty much done for you and that's because of the work that we did with uh integrating uh the two systems together so with that I'm going to turn it over to Joe thanks Chris I think that was a really good demo um I'd like to move on and move into a just a brief summary indicating that poorly performing alarms can contribute to many um undesirable factors in your plan including safety issues and poor performing and loss of profitability and that proper alarm management is essential for maximum efficiency we feel like we've really partnered with a great partner in Pas and they provide a tool here that allows you to really do a fantastic job of implementing an alarm strategy that lines up with the ISA 18.2 standard and provides you know a full set of solutions related to this area we've been we've done a lot of work of integrating in into the D3 as you can see by Chris's demonstration we've really tried to provide a really good value-added solution here whereby you know know the work at the customer level to get the thing integrated and get it up and running is minimized and we've tried to take into account all of the types of things that you'd want to be able to do with the plant States wheat product related to the not only the D3 system but to other other systems and we would like to be considered as the service arm for this product Pas is creating the software novitec would provide the solution to our customers we want to make it clear that you know that it's a One-Stop shop from the customer's perspective you would deal with Nova technically take full responsibility for the operation of the plant States weak product within your within your plant and if you have trouble you we have our product support folks trained and able to deal with problems as a first line of defense and obviously if we can't can't help with that solution we can go directly to Pas through our relation ship and provide any resolution the problems that you're having with that I did have a couple of questions come in while we were talking the first question related to pricing and implementation it says do I have to purchase the entire package or can I purchase various pieces and the answer to that is that you can purchase various components of the plant State Suite depending on what you're looking for for example if you just want to do alarm analysis and documentation and rationalization you can purchase pieces to do that you can purchase audit and enforce you can purchase also the loop performance monitoring products separately and you can contact your local sales person with that question and they can provide quotes with respect to all the different components the second question is we're going to give this one to Chris does the does the data connection the OPC connection cause excessive loading on the system or Network yeah the answer to that is they're in the plan state Suite software there's built-in mechanisms to help you throttle that data there are also other ways that you can connect to your systems you know through Pi there are mechanisms in there that really through scheduling and through throttling that really optimize that that connection okay um one one other last question I have here is can I analyze data um from the past uh do I have real I guess that what that means is do I have just real-time access to data we've set it up so that you can provide alarm history files from you know several several months up to maybe a couple of years where we have the ability to import that um those alarm history files into the plant State Suite database so you don't need to consider this as a just starting now and going forward type of solution you could actually take this and analyze data from the past year and like Chris was saying slice and dice the data any number of ways to provide the information you're looking for to do your your alarm philosophies and your bad actor resolutions and so forth and just just to throw in something there too we have done that for customers in the past where we've customers have provided us with alarm history files we've done the analysis for them and we've used it as a way to justify these projects for the customer sites so that definitely is an option okay and with that I've got Kevin Johnson's account information and contact information on the screen there if you have any questions or you would like to get a live demo or or you'd like to move forward with the next steps of implementing a solution uh with respect to the Pas plant State Suite please give Kevin or your local account manager a call and we'll be glad to help you and thank you very much for attending and we'll see you next time