Development Of An Intelligent Alarm ProcessorFor Electric Power Plants

Abstract

In recent years, power plants have become larger and more complex. This growth in complexity has brought about the need to augment the degree of automatic control in the plants. There is also a requirement for interchangeable modes of operation. A high level of automation permits operations personnel to accomplish this required flexibility of operation. The major drawback of increased automation is that operations personnel become more removed from the control of the plant and tend to rely on alarm systems for information. With thousands of alarms and hundreds of pages of alarm response procedures, it is difficult for operations personnel to react when several alarms are energised. If the operations personnel response is delayed, equipment damage, loss of production or even personal injury may result. Therefore, there is a compelling need for a more effective method of alarm conditioning to help operations personnel react. An intelligent alarm processor (IAP) running in realtime can reduce the number of alarms displayed at any one time. It can also highlight the most important alarms. This paper details the development of a prototype IAP for a power plant. As a test system, the ESB’s 915 MWe power plant at Moneypoint is targeted. The initial test results from the IAP compare favourably with original expectations. Transactions on Information and Communications Technologies vol 20, © 1998 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3517