A widespread issue in manufacturing plants is alarm overload. As formerly independent systems are integrated for more effective operation by fewer operators, each operator has to monitor an increasingly wide area and consequently deal with more alarms. Without rigorous alarm rationalisation efforts, alarm flooding becomes a serious problem and increases the risk of safety and environmental incidents. There are a number of fundamental guidelines such as the EEMUA No.191 to help customers reduce alarms, but practical tools that can be implemented are still in short supply.
Yokogawa Electric Corporation announced the launch of consolidated alarm management doftware for human interface station (CAMS for HIS). According to Yokogawa this is the world's first alarm management solution to utilise the CAMS concept. Yokogawa has been developing a new approach to alarm management in line with its VigilantPlant vision to create a practical and sustainable environment where operators can see clearly, know in advance, and act with agility. This alarm management concept embodies this new approach and helps customers avoid potential safety and environmental incidents caused by alarm overload. It also enables customers to improve operational efficiency under normal conditions, freeing the operators of tedious repetitive tasks and allowing them to focus on true process concerns.
What CAMS enables
CAMS is practical and has an immediate benefit. It accepts the fact that the sources of alarms are proliferating while customer engineering time and resources are limited. Rather than solely relying on rigorous top-down alarm design and redesign, Yokogawa enables a practical, overarching realtime alarm management system that delivers the right information to the right people at the right time.
CAMS for HIS embodies this concept. In realtime, it integrates the acquisition of all alarm and event data, including that from subsystems; normalises and re-classifies this to eliminate incompatibility; allows customers to add useful alarm attributes such as user names, alarm purposes, and allowable time before action; groups the consolidated alarm and event data and removes redundant alarms; suppresses nuisance alarms; and enables the operator to focus on important alarms through filtering, sorting, eclipsing, shelving, and load shedding. Through these innovative functions, this new technology arms customers with a powerful capability to implement a realtime consolidated alarm management system with bottom-up flexibility. This tool also helps customers implement a top-down approach to alarm design by defining good alarms with attributes such as purpose, consequence, and priority.
Who will benefit from CAMS?
Customers facing alarm flooding situations in their plants are prime candidates to introduce CAMS. It will also benefit users who are looking for alarm management capabilities that go beyond the current generation DCS alarm systems and those customers planning to consolidate their control rooms and design their alarm system to be in compliance with the EEMUA No.191 guidelines.
Yokogawa's service offerings for alarm design and improvement
The practical bottom-up approach is complementary to the fundamental top-down improvement initiative of alarm rationalisation. Alarms designed correctly that do not define or generate nuisance alarms go a long way to preventing alarm flooding. In addition to the new CAMS solution, Yokogawa also delivers field-proven tools and consulting services that help customers assess the effectiveness of their current alarm systems, identify the root cause of problems and take appropriate actions to rationalise alarms. The company helps customers combine practical bottom-up solutions with fundamental top-down improvements to build and sustain effective alarm systems for safe and responsive plant operations.
EEMUA No.191 is a guideline for the design, management, and procurement of optimum alarm systems. EEMUA stands for the Engineering Equipment and Materials Users Association, which consists of major suppliers and users of process automation in the oil, gas, chemical and power industries.
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