Value added scada technology.
Version 7.0 of the Adroit Scada/HMI product includes new advanced management technology to improve operator workload, increase efficiencies and minimise downtime.
A large cement producer recently deployed the new advanced alarm management technology and believed the benefits achieved within the first two days paid for the system. Engineering consultant Danie Sadie of SADKons engaged Adroit Technologies to assist with the version upgrade and to deploy and configure the alarm management as part of an on-going service agreement. Mike Lamusse, technical director and the person responsible for the development chose to do the project himself as he had realised that the lessons learned from a practical deployment would prove invaluable in ironing out and rounding off the configuration and resulting reports.
Danie Sadie tells their side of the story, "When we first saw the technology at the launch we were a little disappointed as we believed we had a particular problem, in that we really needed alarm filtering at the scanning level. However, after implementation we have to say that the results we achieved in such a short period of time were amazing. We certainly had not realised we had such a big problem but to be measured and benchmarked with these tools really pointed out our own shortfalls. We knew that we probably had too many nuisance alarms but nothing like the reality. The tools and reports showed that we had on average 540 incidents per hour, with a maximum in one hour of over 1100. The international benchmark is 60 incidents in normal conditions."
Adroit’s technical director, Mike Lamusse: "We deployed Adroit ver 7.0 on the first day and let the system run for 24 hours. We then focused on the few bad actors that were identified by the reports. In conjunction with the customer we adjusted some set points and then let the system run for an additional 24 hours after which we pulled comparative reports. Immediate improvements in operator workload – the number of incidents per hour had dropped considerably. As far as we are concerned this single iteration had made a significant impact and opened the minds of the customer around trying to manage their alarm strategy to achieve world-class status by measuring themselves against international benchmarks."
Advanced alarm management strategy
Over 90% of all installations have some alarming configured but often suffer from the same problems, namely:
* Too many nuisance alarms – scada installations are mostly configured to create an over-abundance of alarms.
* Alarms are ignored – alarms are usually ignored by users because they are either inconsequential, or because there is simply too much information.
* Alarm viewers underutilised – mostly, process faults are adequately displayed by graphical components on the mimic and these are used as a starting point to initiate the correction process making noisy alarm viewers redundant when it should be the most important global view of any process indicating the current health of the process.
* Mass acknowledgement – alarms on alarm viewers tend to be acknowledged blindly.
* Lack of real information – a lot of academic and industry body work has been done around this subject and there are third party software applications making their way into the industrial arena but they are often too complicated and expensive.
Dave Wibberley, managing director of Adroit Technologies adds, "Systems, plants and processes are run by human beings. They are often under pressure, working the third shift, late into the night and lack motivation. The operators running the plant are the people who need to ensure that the process runs optimally. We need to assist and motivate them by focusing their attention on the areas that will firstly, make their lives easier by identifying problem areas and secondly give them information that motivates them by showing how they are going against targets ie, they are on the right track."
What is the solution?
Given that most sites suffer from too much alarm noise. The only way to solve this problem is through a well planned and implemented alarm strategy such as the Adroit Advanced Alarm Agent:
* The Alarm Management Agent – allows users to analyse statistical data of existing alarming configurations and use the information to remove nuisance alarms, adjust noisy alarm limits and identify problematic process areas and equipment.
* Create information out of data – the value of the data generated by scada alarming systems is completely under-utilised due to the lack of statistics that could be generated, analysed and used to improve the process and reduce nuisance alarms.
Methodology
As with Adroit’s usual philosophy the new technology has been integrated as part of the Adroit Scada software. Making deployment and configuration very simple:
* Incidents can be categorised.
* Incident records include time of incident occurring, clearing and acknowledgement.
* Incidents can be enabled for alarm reasoning.
* Incidents are all stored to a database of choice.
* Adroit allows for configuration, post-reasoning and viewing of incidents in tabular or graphic format.
Results
Following a single iteration over a 24-hour measurement period the plant experienced an improvement in a single benchmark of incidents per hour of 35%. Danie Sadie explains, "The plant is extremely encouraged with the initial results and believe they can achieve further improvements in performance around alarming. Without the Adroit tools this would be much more difficult to achieve."
The future
Mike Lamusse, technical director of Adroit Technologies concludes by adding, "Now we have all the data in an open central database the sky is the limit. The future will lie in user abilities to construct their own views of the data. In future roadmaps, we too will be working on delivering even higher value knowledge such as Parent/Child relationships, pointing users in the direction of which alarms are inhibiting production, or even better to find patterns in alarms that will be meaningful to creating a smoother more efficient running operation."
For more information contact Monica Mynhardt, Adroit Technologies, +27 (0)11 658 8100, [email protected], www.adroit.co.za
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