Aligning Alarms with Safety, Quality, and Business Objectives

Visualizing the relationship between operating envelope and alarm limits revolutionizes alarm rationalization, producing an alarm system that performs better, with a fraction of the effort traditionally used. The operating envelope uses the process relationships captured implicitly in the plant history to link operations and achievement of business objectives. This then ties alarm limits to achieving plant performance, beyond safety and plant uptime.

See how it’s done in this webinar. We introduce our novel technology, show how it applies to setting alarm limits in the field of rationalization, and share some successes of improved performance.

Alarms are an essential and powerful tool for operators to keep units running and running safely. When configured and performing well, they are a fingertip on the pulse of operation, alerting the operator to changes before they manifest in degraded quality, process trips or more extreme situations, giving the operator time to correct, avoid, or mitigate the incident. Poorly set alarms often perform badly, actively hindering operations by focusing attention in the wrong places. 

PPCL’s Geometric Process Control (GPC) technology is uniquely suited for visualizing operating envelopes across hundreds of variables, and hundreds of thousands of process history snapshots, showing operating envelopes from process operations, illustrating the relationship between the process operating envelope and existing or proposed alarm limits.