Emerson Exchange 365

In reply to Tinh Phan:

Good point Tinh. Moving the alarm priority to LOG will prevent it from setting an alarm active state at the consoles. Don't have to create Plant Area as I suggested earlier.

Andre Dicaire

In reply to Andre Dicaire:

Operators have been complaining about device alarms on their alarm list. I thought about moving the priority to LOG. I ran "update device alarm defaults" for a CIOC that had some devices with comm alarms, which of course removed the nuisance alarms. But now I am having regrets. My first question is how do go back with that CIOC.

I have a second question, which is what are folks doing with these device alarms? Do you allow them to alarm the operator? On the one hand, it's nice to be warned that a valve has lost its travel sensor. The 4-20 signal will be good, but the process goes crazy. The alarm saves troubleshooting and precious time. On the other hand, a transmitter may have a good 4-20 signal, but HART communication is lost. In that case, the comm alarm is a nuisance to the operator. But it's not a nuisance to maintenance personnel who need to know something isn't working right. What is the best way to display device alarms that balances the competing interests? Is it best to have them all at LOG priority and make maintenance folks go looking for them in process history view? Is it better to set up a plant area for device alarms so operators can filter them on or off as needed? Or is it better to have them in the same plant area as their associated modules to bother the operator so that he/she calls somebody to go fix the devices? Maybe the link Tinh gave us above could have helped me, but I don't have permission to access the information, because I was not at the conference.

In reply to Mark Bendele:

I would assign the device alarm to an area (e.g, MAINTENANCE_AREA) where only maintenance personnel will see it.

In reply to Andre Dicaire:

There are a few different ways to separate your alarms depending on your plant size. Our plant prefers to separate them into four categories.

Alarms for Operators (process), E/I (maint), AMS (field device) and Controls (DeltaV device).

Operators see alarms for the Plant_Area assigned to their station with narrow scope of priorities, ideally for things they have direct control over.

E/I see alarms with one specific maintenance priority -MAINT_LOW- on dedicated maintenance stations. This could be things like DeltaV hardware advise alarms (open loop, line fault etc), Deviation alarms, equipment health and building temp.

AMS is really part of the maintenance stations but the field instrumentation alarms are assigned to their own Plant_Area called Devices and the priority is shared with E/I. This makes it easy to filter the alarm list for investigation.

Controls have most of the DeltaV builtin hardware alarms with a specific maintenance priority - MAINT_HIGH. This allows the Controls folks to keep track of the DeltaV system hardware. COMM_ALM, FAILED_ALM and MAINT_ALM are all priority MAINT_HIGH. The hardware alarm ADVISE_ALM is directed to E/I since it usually represents a field problem. Controls also have a few process alarms directed their way by having the priority set to MAINT_HIGH such as DeltaV cabinet temperature and DC power supply health.


Personally, I think the less time spent in PHV, the better.