Abstract
Despite significant improvements being made in control and safety systems, near-miss incidents and adverse accidents continue to occur in the industry. Indeed, humans have a vital role in process control success or failure due to their responses to abnormal situations and alarms. A broad study on the alarm system performance shows that good rationalization and accurate prioritization of alarms should increase the efficacy of alarm systems and improve operator decision performances. This paper discusses current gaps in alarm prioritization approaches. It then proposes a method based on Graph theory and metrics capabilities to facilitate and improve the alarm prioritization process. The method is developed based on the causal and layer of protection modeling, followed by measuring the graph metrics for prioritization purposes. Finally, the proposed method is evaluated through implementation in a simulated case study. Results show that this approach facilitates similar achievement to the alarm workshop and produces more valuable data to the cascade of abnormal situations in a structured method and shorter time.
Highlights
Alarm systems and operator responses to them are crucial in effectively managing process deviations and abnormal event situations
The current paper develops a method for alarm prioritization based on Graph metrics
The alarm philosophy abstracted above was applied to the design of the alarm system whilst the following hazards were considered for the simulation: equipment failure, overfilling, spillover, uncontrollable reaction, overpressure protection, over-temperature, and leakage or massive release [58]
Summary
Alarm systems and operator responses to them are crucial in effectively managing process deviations and abnormal event situations. This paper follows our previous research in which a method for alarm rationalization was introduced in [17] and takes a step towards developing practical solutions that comply with the standards and guidelines to address concerns with alarm floods It does so by proposing a method for better alarm prioritization that reduces the number of unnecessary and less important alarms presented to the operator when trying to manage abnormal situations. This approach aims to produce an alarm system that notifies the operator in a timely manner that enhances the operators' decision-making process instead of adversely impacting.
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