Alarms and Equipment States

How many reports on hazardous incidents have you read about where the alarms presented to the operators were excessive and the resulting confusion contributed to the incident.

I was reminded by this article

Why Is Safety so HARD?

The problem has been known and understood for decades, and now we all know that alarms should be suppressed when they are not relevant, and that when they are they should be prioritised.

But engineering a solution is time consuming and expensive.

The solution has to be specified, reviewed and approved, and maintained as operating experience is gained and the solution is modified, via an approved change process of course.

Typically these are described by text, cause and effect matrices and logic diagrams.  

Mostly the cause and effect matrices describe the responses to potential hazardous events, such as process upsets. The matrices do not often cover the alarms, although some do mention them typically in notes. Some control system actually support Cause and Effect matrix based design, and can translate them into control logic. For example Siemens has one

These are much more constrained than the typical excel version that people produce.

 

Using a state model provides a highly efficient way to define the enabling of alarms. The safety system, as a complete entity is defined in terms of possible states, a method that vastly reduces the number of states that have to be considered.

Then each possible alarm can be considered for it relevance in each state, producing an Alarm State Matrix.