Design Like a Pro: Alarm Management

Moderator

Don Pearson

Chief Strategy Officer

Inductive Automation

Today’s Agenda

• Introduction to Ignition

• Understand What Alarms Are For

• Don't Let Alarms Get Out of Control

• Organize Your Alarms

• Prioritize Your Alarms

• Shelve & Disable Alarms When Necessary

• Consolidate Alarms

• Escalate Alarms

• Remote Alarm Notification

• Q&A

About Inductive Automation

• Founded in 2003

• HMI, SCADA, MES, and IIoT software

• Installed in 100+ countries

• Over 1,500 integrators

• Used by 44% of Fortune 100 companies

Learn more at: inductiveautomation.com/about

Used By Industries Worldwide

Ignition: Industrial Application Platform

One Universal Platform for SCADA, MES & IIoT:

• Unlimited licensing model

• Cross-platform compatibility

• Based on IT-standard technologies

• Scalable server-client architecture

• Web-managed

• Web-launched on desktop or mobile

• Modular configurability

• Rapid development and deployment

Presenter

Travis Cox

Co-Director of Sales Engineering,

Inductive Automation

A Poorly Managed Alarm System

Best Practices from the Alarm Management Handbook

Understand What Alarms Are For

Alarms are:

• Conditions evaluated with respect to a specific numeric data point

• Usually configured on a tag or data point


Basic Alarm Terms:

• Active or Clear

• Alarm Notification

• Alarm Journal


Alarms:

• Tell when something is wrong in your system

• Must be managed carefully

• Can cover up the real problem when there are too

many of them

Don't Let Alarms Get Out of Control

How to Best Use Alarms:

• For problems that require action

• To easily identify an issue

• Use alarms sparingly


Common Alarm System Problems:

• Alarm Flood: 10+ alarms in a 10-min period

• Stale Alarm: Stays in alarm state continuously for 24+ hrs

• Chattering Alarm: Goes from active clear 3+ times in 1 min


Benchmarks:

• 150 alarms or less per day is considered manageable

• No more than 20 alarm floods per week

• No more than 20 stale alarms per week

• No more than 10 chattering alarms per week

Organize Your Alarms

Use Hierarchy to Filter Alarms for Operators

• Two ways to filter alarms:

◦ Naming and organization of tags and folders

Organize Your Alarms

Use Hierarchy to Filter Alarms for Operators

• Two ways to filter alarms:

◦ Naming and organization of tags and folders

◦ Associated data

Demo: Alarm Filtering

Prioritize Your Alarms

Prioritize Your Alarms

Priority Levels:

• Set most alarms at a lower priority

• Set alarms that do not require a

response as Diagnostic

Demo: How to Prioritize an Alarm

Shelve and Disable Alarms When Necessary

Shelving:

• Temporarily silencing an alarm


Disabling

• Stopping an alarm from being evaluated

• Can be used for nuisance alarms

(upstream/downstream)


State-Based Alarming (a.k.a. Alarm Flood Suppression):

• Disable alarms for machines that are intentionally turned off

• Alarm settings dynamically adjusted to match proper settings for each

state

• Before using state-based alarming, assess whether your process is a

good candidate for it.

Demo: Shelving and Disabling Alarms

Consolidate Alarms

Reduce the Number of Alarms

• Avoid alarm floods by consolidating multiple alarms into a single

message

Consolidate Alarms

Delay and Frequency

Demo: Alarm Consolidation

Escalate Alarms

• Changing the priority, type, and/or distribution of unacknowledged

notification

Escalate Alarms in Ignition

Alarm Notification Pipelines:

• Innovative graphical design feature for quickly building alarm

notification logic

• Use drag-and-drop to create notification scenarios

• Connect schedules, users’ contact information, rosters and

notification profiles

• When an alarm is cleared, acknowledged, or shelved, it drops out of

the pipeline

Demo: Alarm Escalation

Remote Alarming in Ignition

Remote Alarm Notification:

• Configure tags on one gateway

• Alarms sent through a central gateway

• Manage Email, Voice, and SMS equipment from a central location

and provide those services to a multitude of Gateways

Demo: Remote Alarm Notification

Maintain Your Improved Alarm System

• Create an alarm philosophy document

• Create a master alarm database (alarm

rationalization)

• Document, communicate, and approve all

changes to the alarming system

• Audit your overall alarm management work

processes continuously

Best Practices Recap

• Think about alarms and manage them carefully.

• Use filtering to organize alarms.

• Prioritize alarms (most should be diagnostic).

• Know how and when to shelve alarms.

• Disable nuisance alarms when necessary.

• Consolidate alarms to reduce alarm floods.

• Use escalation to notify team members selectively.

• Maintain the system with document, database, and regular

audits.

Design Like a Pro Series

Available at: inductiveautomation.com/resources

Questions & Comments

Jim Meisler x227

Vannessa Garcia x231

Vivian Mudge x253

Account Executives

Myron Hoertling x224

Shane Miller x218

Ramin Rofagha x251

Maria Chinappi x264

Dan Domerofski x273

Lester Ares x214

800-266-7798 x247

Melanie Moniz

Director of Sales:

Jeff Osterback x207

Travis Cox

Co-Director of Sales Engineering:

x229

[email protected]

Design Like a Pro: Alarm Management

Technology

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