Alarm Management Moves into the IIoT Age

The world of alarm management for the process industries is changing rapidly, creating new challenges and opportunities for end users. Many end users with older legacy alarm management systems now face migration and modernization challenges. At the same time, many are evolving from their earlier focus on alarm rationalization and KPI reporting functions to the more sophisticated and proactive alarm management lifecycle strategy outlined in the ISA 18.2 standard. Meanwhile, new technologies like cloud-hosted applications and analytics promise to reduce the cost and risk of implementing alarm management applications, while improving plant performance to support operational excellence.

In today’s increasingly connected world, alarm-related information comes from an increasingly wide range of sources, not just the process automation system. Cybersecurity systems, asset management systems, and many other subsystems provide data that is relevant to alarms. As this “data lake” gets larger and increasingly difficult to manage, analytical tools will be required to make sense of it all to enable the alarm management system to provide operators with actionable information.

As the leading worldwide supplier of alarm management solutions, Honeywell Process Solutions has evolved its alarm management offering considerably since its initial acquisition of Matrikon seven years ago. Honeywell recently sat down with ARC analysts to talk about the latest release of the company’s DynAMo alarm and operations management suite of applications, which now includes cloud-based capabilities, more sophisticated reporting and analytics functions, and provides a common interface for KPI reporting across multiple plants and systems.

Moving to a True Alarm Management Strategy
Users are looking to migrate not just to get better reports, but also to make better use of the information generated by those reports. Users should keep in mind that a key goal of alarm management is not just to reduce alarms to a manageable level, but to get alarms as close to zero as possible. Effective alarm management equals effective process management.

Many end users are moving beyond the initial stages of implementing a full alarm management strategy, such as alarm rationalization and KPI reporting, to a more mature approach that is closer to the true proactive alarm management lifecycle outlined in the ISA 18.2 standard. New approaches like analytics and Big Data will provide end users with new insight into why alarms happened, not just that they happened.

A recent ARC survey on adoption of alarm management solutions corroborates this trend, with over 23 percent of respondents indicating that they were in the middle of a migration project related to alarm management, while 20 percent indicated that they were undergoing a significant upgrade of their existing alarm management application.

DynAMo Offers More Advanced Functions While Reducing Cost and Risk
The Honeywell DynAMo offering, a full suite of alarm management applications and services, ranges from basic functions like rationalization to alarm analysis and KPIs, embedded operator guidance, and mode- and state-based alarming. The most recent version offers much more advanced functions in line with Honeywell’s new focus on cloud-based applications, managed services, and reducing the risk and cost of implementing alarm management solutions. Some key functions that ARC finds interesting include the solution’s cloud-based functionality, embedded operator response guidance, and new KPI reporting capabilities. Honeywell is also partnering with sister company UOP to develop preconfigured process control and alarm management schemes to significantly reduce the cost to implement on UOP-licensed technology units.

Cloud-based Alarm Management Solutions
Along with many other applications from Honeywell, the latest version of the DynAMo offering is now available through Honeywell’s Sentience cloud platform. Many end users have expressed interest in taking their level 3 applications, including alarm management, to the cloud. Providing cloud-based alarm management applications allows end users to reduce the risk and cost of deploying an alarm management solution to a significant degree. For example, for large end users with hundreds of sites using alarm management, a centrally managed, cloud-based solution can make administering and upgrading all these sites much easier and cost effective. For smaller end users without the resources needed to deploy a fully functional alarm management solution on site, a cloud-based solution can again provide a cost-effective alternative, without the need to manage on-site IT infrastructure and other administrative requirements.

Cloud-based applications have other benefits that offer a path to operational excellence. Elevating communication outside of the control room to process, plant, and automation engineers enables them to solve problems faster and improves situational awareness and collaboration.

Embedded Operator Response Guidance
Many end users are specifying embedded operator guidance for their alarm management systems. This increases operator effectiveness by providing the operator with the correct actions to take depending on the situation. It also provides a way to support less-experienced operators who may not know the proper response to take in each situation. The DynAMo solution provides this embedded operator response guidance as well, and can tell the operator the likely cause of an alarm, the consequence if the alarm is not dealt with, and the corrective actions required to restore the process to normal.

KPI Reporting and Analysis Across the Enterprise
Many end users rely heavily on their alarm management system as an analysis and management tool to capture events, produce KPI reports, and mine data. These reports are often used to support a continuous improvement initiative; an alarm management best practice that is consistent with the alarm management lifecycle outlined in the ISA 18.2, EEMUA, and IEC 62682 standards. Operations can use the periodic reports to address problem alarms, an initial function of an alarm management system for most end users.

Many end users also value the alarm management database as a single source of information to store and track alarm information, provide a mechanism for management of change (MoC) related to alarms, and perform root cause analysis of events.

The DynAMo solution features enterprise-level KPI reporting capabilities that can take data from many different sources, including other DCSs, and provide a single consolidated view of KPIs across multiple sites. Smart Report capabilities bring key analysis components together into a centralized group of reports using standard reporting “widgets.” This prevents users from having to run multiple separate reports to find the root cause of a problem. Any standard reporting widget can be dropped onto the DynAMo Report Layout Manager and it will automatically connect to and seamlessly share data with any other reporting widget on the same template.

Preconfigured Alarm Management Solutions for UOP Processes
Standardized, modular, and open approaches to automation are driving the next generation of process automation systems. In addition, modular approaches reduce costs and compress schedules for plant construction and project execution. Recently, ARC learned about how Honeywell Process Solutions and Honeywell UOP are teaming up to provide preconfigured automation solutions for UOP process units. These solutions combine the respective process and automation knowledge of those two Honeywell business units to reduce configuration time and effort, implement more effective process control and alarm management schemes, reduce risk, and speed time to startup.

DynAMo Solutions Suite for UOP, a collaboration between Honeywell HPS and Honeywell UOP, delivers alarm documentation and guidance to operators for alarms related to UOP process units. This helps reduce operator error and improve operator responsiveness to abnormal situations. For each UOP alarm, the solution provides the alarm cause, alarm consequence, and appropriate operator corrective actions.

Alarm documentation typically comes out of the alarm rationalization process, which is both time- and resource-intensive. Experion Solution Suites provide an alternative solution by pre-loading the Honeywell DynAMo alarm management application with UOP alarm documentation.

Conclusions
A new or upgraded alarm management solution could potentially support many transformative technologies. The information from a new alarm management system could be used in the context of a data analytics solution. Many large plants are finding hidden value analyzing the data in some of their otherwise masked abnormal situations; or “near misses.” To find and analyze those near misses, event context is needed. The Honeywell DynAMo system helps provide this context through a good set of KPI reporting and analysis tools. Alarms and alerts in today’s plants come from many sources, not just the control system. DynAMo’s ability to consolidate data from a wide variety of sources and vendor control systems can provide significant value on its own. The system’s cloud-based capabilities also allow for more effective data consolidation and sharing of consistent, contextual information across the enterprise.

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Keywords: Alarm Management, Honeywell, DynAMo, Cloud-Based Applications, Managed Services, Modularization, ARC Advisory Group.