Alarm management

Alarm management is the practice of designing, rationalizing and maintaining the alarm system of an industrial plant so that its operators can actually use it. It applies human factors and ergonomics together with instrumentation engineering and systems thinking. The usual problem it addresses is too many alarms sounding at once during a plant upset, called an alarm flood, though poorly designed alarms, badly set alarm points, ineffective annunciation and unclear messages are also targets. The need arose when distributed control systems made alarms cheap to add, so installers alarmed almost everything, and operators were swamped with data but short of useful information. Customer users of industrial control systems formed a task force in 1990 that grew into the Abnormal Situation Management Consortium, and its work fed the EEMUA 191 guideline. Standards now include ISA 18.2, IEC 62682, API 1167 and NAMUR NA 102.