Improved process control alarm operation

Alarms are the main connection from the automation to the operator, when addressing process operation outside of its normal function. They are often as much a source of operator overload and consternation as help. Better engineering of the relative role of the operator and automation would materially help overcome the difficulties. Expert systems have been proposed as a solution. But Expert systems are really another form of automation. There remains that aspect of the alarms, which must address our inability to cover and understand a possibly larger domain of the operation not appropriate to traditional controls or present-day automation. Appropriate tools for this domain must support operator discretion and initiative. The paper suggests a set of such general, computer science based, tools requiring only the most basic configuration. They are viewed as implemented on top of those properly detailed alarm displays and interlocks, which reflect the more formal plant operating policies. They include: (a) Various forms of alarm logging and trending; (b) Short, automatically generated, word summaries of alarm activity, which allow low level data to propagate to the highest levels, including: one word and priority summaries; (c) Causal alarm pattern analyses that help the operator to predict or diagnose alarm behavior; (d) Automatic adaptation of alarms and alarm limits to varying process situations; (e) Uniform use of alarm policies to simplify alarm configuration.