hi, I know DeltaV comes out of the box with 3 alarm priorities (low, med & high). As a company, we are looking at introducing a 4th alarm priority for 'Highly Managed Alarms', which would be a higher priority then the standard high alarm. I would be very interested in hearing DeltaV Users thoughts around using a 4th alarm priority and would be more interested in hearing from users that are actively using more then the 3 standard alarm priorities. Various discussions within alarm management courses have identified a 4th alarm priority is becoming more common for highly managed alarms and the common color seems to be purple. We're on version 11.3.1 so not sure if newer versions come with more options. I'm aware of the DeltaV setup for alarms, with alarm priorities ranging from 1 to 15, 15 being the highest.
any comments would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Stuart, Adding one or more alarm priorities isn't something I would see as a problem. As an example, batch prompts or other types of "messages" would certainly have a separate priority. I have had a customer add "Operator Alerts" as a medium type of priority to give the operators a set of non-engineered alarm limits to use at their discretion. The question I am asking back is two-fold: 1) what is the purpose of "Highly Managed Alarms" as a priority? How does this fit into your alarm philosophy? 2) Why does this need to have a higher severity than "Critical" alarms? Recall that the three out-of-the-box priorities are pretty standard: 1) Advisory (low) - device alerts, maintenance items, etc 2) Warning (medium) - your process is trending in a negative direction but isn't critical yet, and 3) Critical - process shutdown is imminent. It is hard for me to place an alarm with a higher severity than Critical - unless it was either very limited number of items or something truly safety related. As an example: if you wanted your SIS alarms to have a different sound or color, then that would be an example that seems reasonable to me. On the topic of colors, I have used orange for the afore-mentioned "Operator Alerts."
If you do not have an alarm philosophy document or have not developed an alarm rationalization process, I would strongly encourage you to do so. Emerson has a partner, Exida, who's sole purpose is to do and advise on these types of topics.
That is my $0.02. Dave
In reply to gxmontes:
That's correct Gilbert, Alarm Description was released in v12.
Here's a view of where it resides:
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