Development of an efficient alarm management package for an industrial process plant

Alarm management is considered to be an important issue in industrial plants which is often cited as contributing factor in industrial incidents due to alarm flood. Modern industrial automation systems usually produce more alarm data, making their management a non-trivial task. As a result, operators are faced with a challenging environment, having more alarms than they can effectively handle. Alarm management, in fact, seeks to identify unnecessary alarms with wrong setting values in order to improve the current procedures for dealing with alarms. This paper aims to practically demonstrate the effect of using alarm management in operation of an industrial process plant. For this purpose, an integrated state-based alarm management package will be developed in a software framework using an ASPEN-based environment to simulate an industrial debutanizer unit as case study by preserving its operational realities. The developed alarm management package is realized in MATLAB to mimic as a third-party tool. An interface link is implemented between these two different software environments via an OLE (Object Linking Embedding) protocol. Performance of the developed alarm management package will be investigated in different test scenarios including normal operation, scheduled shutdown and unexpected shutdown.