Core principles of alarm configuration and management are easy enough to state, e.g.,

• An alarm must represent an abnormal situation requiring a response
• An effective alarm must alert, inform, and guide

However, the devil seems to be in the details of implementation. A common situation in batch industries today is a plant automation system generating alarms and storing alarm records in which the alarms and records of interest: 1) are buried in a mountain of other data, including nuisance alarms and notification records, and 2) often lack sufficient context to facilitate interpretation and analysis. This has led to 1) operator frustrations and 2) lack of much mining of alarm data by plant technical personnel for its information and knowledge content.

A vision for batch process alarm management is to take the current alarm gold mine landscape, currently littered with large amounts of “fools gold” and other informational distractions, and evolve to a smaller more concentrated mine of real gold nuggets.

Improvements are needed with 1) the systems and techniques that generate alarms, 2) the HMI, and 3) the Historian environment.

This paper will include some suggestions as to how alarm management can be improved at each of the above 3 levels and note some currently available technologies and techniques that can help. The role of standards S88 (batch process automation), S95 (computer system hierarchy), and the evolving S18 (alarm management) in helping plants with batch process alarm management is also discussed.