Current Status of DCS System Alarm Management
1.1 Difficulties in alarm management of heterogeneous DCS systems
At present, many process industry enterprises in China have extensively used DCS systems to improve production automation. However, due to historical reasons such as lack of experience in initial planning, the brand and model of DCS systems are often chaotic, without forming a unified plan, resulting in a large number of heterogeneous DCS systems. DCS systems all have alarm modules, but alarm modules from different brands of DCS do not have the ability to communicate with each other, and the alarm models are also different. Unified management has become a major challenge for heterogeneous DCS systems. Within the same enterprise, the alarm system forms multiple isolated blocks and is dispersed into multiple information islands. The human-machine interface cannot be unified, nor can it further explore and apply alarm information. It can only be applied to the grassroots site, which forms an information barrier for management and brings great management inconvenience.
1.2 The surge in the number of alarms poses a risk of accidents
The application of DCS system makes alarm setting very convenient and inexpensive, but convenience and affordability also bring corresponding problems – the arbitrariness of alarm setting. In many enterprises, the current problem is no longer insufficient alarms, but excessive and improper alarms. A large number of and inefficient alarms bring huge potential risks to enterprise production, not only reducing production profits, but also potentially causing huge losses to life and property.
In 1994, an explosion and fire occurred at the Texaco refinery in Milford Port, UK. Within 11 minutes before the explosion, the system generated 275 alarms, which were only handled by two staff members who were unable to identify meaningful information among the numerous alarms. As a result, tragedy occurred.
The unreasonable number of DCS alarm settings, improper priority configuration, improper parameter configuration, and inability to identify and prevent alarm floods are common problems in current DCS system alarms.
Chart SEQ \ * ARABIC 1 Excessive number of alarms causing potential accident hazards
1.3 The demand for deep processing of original alarm information
Although most DCS systems have alarm functions, these functions are often designed for on-site control and are relatively primitive. After a long period of sedimentation, alarm historical information can actually have more utilization value. Through statistical analysis and big data mining, it can provide more management application functions such as discovering equipment failure hazards, preventing potential production accidents, improving production efficiency, and KPI management for production personnel, providing auxiliary information for production decision-making for management, And these are often not available in existing DCS systems.
Unified management of 2 heterogeneous DCS alarms
The primary issue in solving the unified management of heterogeneous DCS alarms is the ability to collect alarm information that exists in the system in a unified manner. The FAlarm industrial intelligent alarm management platform of Force Control Technology provides a solution for this. Most DCS systems provide OPC A&E Server, and Force Control Falarm can collect alarm information from DCS equipment through the OPC standard protocol; For DCS that cannot provide OPC A&E, Force Control provides multiple standard communication protocols, and even customizes interfaces based on DCS APIs to meet the collection needs of various DCS alarms.
The second issue in solving the unified management of heterogeneous DCS alarms is to unify the model of alarm information in the system. Force Control FAlarm has established a unified alarm model within the system, which analyzes heterogeneous DCS alarm information and unifies the alarm model to facilitate various subsequent processing.
The third issue in solving the unified management of heterogeneous DCS alarms is the unification of human-machine interfaces. Force Control FAlarm provides a human-machine interface system based on a web browser, which can unify the visualization of alarm information for all DCS systems, providing real-time alarms, historical alarms, alarm maintenance, alarm statistical analysis and other visualization content. It also provides various visualization methods for reports and charts, and can be displayed in combination with on-site process flow screens or integrated with GIS (Geographic Information System).
3. Reduce accident hazards caused by DCS system alarms
In order to reduce the risks caused by improper industrial alarms and provide best practices for industrial alarm management, the International Component ASM was established in 1992 with the original intention of promoting the improvement of DCS alarm systems. In 2009, the official international standard for industrial alarm management, ISA-18.2 (ANSI/ISA-18.2-2009 Management of Alarm Systems for the Process Industries), was launched.
The content of this standard covers the entire lifecycle of alarm management, and its core is the KPI of the alarm system itself, that is, how to correctly and continuously improve alarms, reduce ineffective and inefficient alarms, reduce alarm floods, and thus reduce the risk of production accidents.