Special report: Plant safety and environment: Intelligent alarm management in a petroleum refinery

Abstract

The intelligent alarm management system (IAMS) was built for suppressing nuisance alarm as well as providing valuable advisory information to help the panel operator focus quickly on important alarm information and take correct and quick action. A project to develop an IAMS to be used in a refinery in Singapore is presented. At the start of the project, the refinery recorded, on average, one alarm every 50 sec during normal operation and one alarm every 10 sec during plant upsets. After installing the IAMS, the average number of process alarms was ∼ 1000/day in normal conditions (about one alarm/3 min-station, should be manageable according to HSE survey). The alarm reduction was ∼ 50%. When the aromatic plant had an emergency shutdown due to a power loss, the IAMS was running in the background and contributed significantly to reducing alarm numbers for that day. With the IAMS, the total number of process alarms was 5629 (5333 alarms during shutdown from 14:04 to 24:00). Without the IAMS, the total number of process alarms would be at ≤ 9750 (would increase by 73%).