Alarm Management History
Recognizing that alarms were becoming a problem, industrial control system users banded together and formed the Alarm Management Task Force, which was a customer advisory board led by Honeywell in 1990. The AMTF included participants from chemical, petrochemical, and refining operations. They gathered and wrote a document on the issues associated with alarm management. This group quickly realized that alarm problems were simply a subset of a larger problem, and formed the Abnormal Situation Management Consortium (ASM is a registered trademeark of Honeywell). The ASM Consortium developed a research proposal and was granted funding from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 1994.The focus of this work was addressing the complex human-system interaction and factors that influence successful performance for process operators. Automation solutions have often been developed without consideration of the human that needs to interact with the solution. In particular, alarms are intended to improve situation awareness for the control room operator, but a poorly configured alarm system does not achieve this goal.
The ASM Consortium has produced documents on best practices in alarm management, as well as operator situation awareness, operator effectiveness, and other operator-oriented issues. These documents were originally for ASM Consortium members only, but the ASMC has recently offered these documents publicly.
The ASM consortium also participated in development of an alarm management guideline published by the Engineering Equipment & Materials Users' Association (EEMUA) in the UK. The ASM Consortium provided data from their member companies, and contributed to the editing of the guideline. The result is EEMUA 191 "Alarm Systems- A Guide to Design, Management and Procurement".
Several institutions and societies are producing standards on alarm management to assist their members in the best practices use of alarms in industrial manufacturing systems. Among them are the ISA (ISA SP-18), API (API 1167) and NAMUR (Namur NA 102). Several companies also offer software packages to assist users in dealing with alarm management issues. Among them are DCS manufacturing companies, and third-party vendors who offer add-on systems.
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