Leading paths to greater awareness, faster response and better decisions

Handling the unplanned outages has become the number-one priority for many companies today. On an average, operators deal with thousands of alarms per day. Hence, they should face no more than two alarms per 10-minute period but alarm overload distracts the operators and often causes unplanned downtime.

For maximum plant performance, high performance HMI and advanced alarm management helps to improve the operator’s tools and work environment. An ABB case study reveals savings of more than $800.000 from upgrading to a high performance HMI.

Importance of HMI

In control rooms of old, the number of alarms was limited by the amount of space on the control room panel board and the cost of wiring equipment from the production area to the board.

Annunciators, indicators and switches (to acknowledge and clear a resolved alarm) had to be essential to justify a place on the panel. If a new alarm was needed, an existing alarm would usually have to  make way.

This began to change with digital signals and the distributed control system (DCS) in the 1980s. Panel boards were replaced by monitors and servers, and signals were transmitted from plant equipment to computer processors, where the signals were turned into actionable information. But the alarms were overloading the control room and terms such as flooding, nuisance, chattering, fleeting and stale were coined to describe them and their effect on the operators.