Alarm Configuration Tuning

Eva Jerhotov, Petr Stluka

Honeywell Prague Laboratory

APC9, York, UK, Sep 2011

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APC9 2011

Jerhotov, Stluka

Contents
Introduction & Project Scope
Mapping Symptoms to Actions
Method Verification
Conclusion

APC9 2011

Jerhotov, Stluka

Contents
Introduction & Project Scope
Mapping Symptoms to Actions
Method Verification
Conclusion

APC9 2011

Jerhotov, Stluka

Introduction
Research conducted by the Abnormal Situation Management (ASM)
Consortium
www.asmconsortium.net
Bad actor reduction

- Ideally, alarms are announced only when an operator action is required to

handle an abnormal process situation.

- Bad actors are alarms with no or little information value and represent
symptoms of inappropriately configured alarm parameters. These alarms
should be reduced via alarm system maintenance and rationalization.

- Current distributed control systems provide only a minimal support for

selecting optimal alarm parameter values.

Focus of our project:

- Reviewing, adjusting and tuning of alarm configuration parameters

(focusing on dead-bands and delay timers).

- Develop mapping between symptoms of typical alarm performance issues

and recommended actions for their improvement.

- Supporting an engineer in off-line alarm parameters adjustments

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Bad Actors Reduction

Deadband

Delay timers

- Eliminates chattering alarms (alarms

which turn ON and OFF quickly and
repeatedly)

- Off-delay timers eliminate chattering

alarms

The effect of deadband

- On-delay timers eliminate fleeting

alarms

APC9 2011

Jerhotov, Stluka

Solution Map

Reduce the effect of

small variations in
analogue variables
Off-delay and ondelay timers
Fundamental
parameters; process
knowledge required for
any changes
Primarily related to
control; only
secondarily influence
on alarm performance
Has been addressed
by a parallel project

APC9 2011

Jerhotov, Stluka

Contents
Introduction & Project Scope
Mapping Symptoms to Actions
Method Verification
Conclusion

APC9 2011

Jerhotov, Stluka

Implementation Aspects
Requirements for the configuration tuning method

- Off-line use with a human in the loop (process engineer)

- Tuning is interactive (not producing only a single value of the
-

parameter)
Visualization
Providing insights and increasing confidence in the resulting values
Interactively displaying impacts of the parameter change

Displaying multiple PVs at a time (increased work efficiency)

- Tuning is applied selectively only to poorly performing alarms

APC9 2011

Jerhotov, Stluka

Decision Making Model

Alarm performance
metrics, time
series data, etc.

Alarm re-configuration,
instrument maintenance,
etc.
Outputs

Inputs
Orienting

Evaluating

Symptoms

Reasons

Acting
Actions

Decision-making
model for alarm
performance analysis

Assessing
1.

2.

3.

Symptoms
Frequent alarm activation and deactivation, high proportion of noise in the PV data,
alarms of very short duration, etc.
Reasons
Inadequate signal range, too tight doubled-up alarm limits, inadequate dead-band,
duplicated alarms, etc.
Actions
Deadbands and delay timers tuning, etc.

APC9 2011

Jerhotov, Stluka

Sampling Rate of PV Data

Frequency content analysis

- Freq. content does not change significantly over time alarm

-

parameters based on freq. characteristics may remain constant for the

whole length of the signal
We verified experimentally that the noise causing alarm chatter is
mostly process-generated
Occupies lower frequencies than measurement noise
May be captured by usual sampling rates of process historians.
PV **FI***

PV **L1***

The part of the spectrum that we

use for deadband value estimation
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Symptoms Detection
Pie charts are suitable for
displaying partitions (e.g. alarm
counts for a selected PV)

Alarm Count
3500 3329
3000
2500
2000

1891
1545

1500
1000
500

1390

1316
864
377 336

326 267
218

200 194 176

175 156 141 135

133 115

T0
89
.
T0 BA
45 DP
V
.B
T1 AD
T3 73
PV
86 .BA
.O
D
FF PV
N
O
T0
R
52 M
T1 .PV
62
LO
.
T2 BA
D
T3 69
P
68 .BA V
.O
D
FF PV
T0 NO
42 RM
.B
T1 AD
34 PV
T0 .PV
24
LO
.
T2 BA
58 DP
V
.B
A
T1 DP
82 V
T0 .PV
59 HI
.P
T0 VL
64 O
.P
T0 VH
13
I
T1 .PV
79 HI
.
T0 PVL
48
O
.P
T3 VL
33 O
.
T1 PVH
34
I
.P
VH
I

Pareto charts as an
alternative to TreeMaps

Alarm Performance Metrics:

- Overall alarm count
- Max. 10-minutes alarm rate
- Proportion of alarms of short betweenalarms distances or short durations
- Proportion of unacknowledged alarm events
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APC9 2011

TreeMaps are useful for navigating to the

problematic points

Jerhotov, Stluka

Deadband Tuning
1. Deadband value estimation (starting point)

- A. EEMUA 191 guidelines

PV Type

Deadband

- B. Ahlund-Berquist method
1/3 of the signal standard deviation

Off-Delay

Flow

5 % of range 15 s

Level

5 % of range 60 s

Pressure

2 % of range 15 s

- C. Data-driven method
Noise variance estimation

Temperature 1 % of range 60 s
Other

5s

2. Interactive deadband tuning

- Alarm history replay:

Assessment of alarm events before & after the parameter change

- Types of visualizations:
Time series plots with alarm and deadband limits
Alarm events plots (alarm is on/off)
Histograms of closely spaced alarms and short alarms

Graphs of alarm count reduction percentage

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Contents
Introduction & Project Scope
Mapping Symptoms to Actions
Method Verification
Conclusion

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Deadband Tuning Alarm History Replay

**FI***.PVLO
**LI***.PVHI
**LI***.PVLO
**F4***.PVHI
**T4***.PVHI
**T4***.PVLO
**F1***.PVLO

The EEMUA settings are in

all cases greater than both
the our method and AhlundBerquist settings, and seem
a bit too wide.

Our Method

The deadband parameter yields a significant

improvement of the overall alarm count for:
**LI***.PVHI

For **T4***.PVHI, the improvement is not

so high (about 20 %), but all these alarms
events are closely spaced.

**FI***.PVLO

**F1***.PVLO
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Deadband Tuning - Visualizations

**F4***)

Alarm reduction multiple

chattering events concatenated
into a longer one.

Some isolated events

are prolonged and
some are not

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Time series plot and alarm events plot displaying the effect of the
deadband estimated via the MAD of the wavelet details from level 3

APC9 2011

Jerhotov, Stluka

Deadband Tuning - Visualizations

Reduction of alarm events
of short mutual distances
(chattering alarms)

Distance between alarms

Alarm events

Reduction of alarm events of

short duration (chattering and
fleeting alarms)
Alarm duration
Alarm events

Alarm count reduction achieved by the deadband estimated via the MAD

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On-Delay Timer Tuning

On-delay timer tuning:

- In literature, there is a lack of methods for on-delay timer estimation

-

(both heuristic and data-driven)

We use visualizations and alarm history replay
Useful type of visualization: graph of short alarm events reduction
We selected timer values which seemed optimal at least for one alarm

type (PVLO and PVHI) of each variable while keeping the values for the
three flow variables smaller than 15 s

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On-Delay Timer Tuning

**FI***.PVLO
**LI***.PVHI
**LI***.PVLO
**F4***.PVHI
**T4***.PVHI
**T4***.PVLO
**F1***.PVLO

Count reduction of short alarms for

different values of the on-delay timer

**FI***.PVLO
**LI***.PVHI
**LI***.PVLO
**F4***.PVHI
**T4***.PVHI
**T4***.PVLO
**F1***.PVLO

Overall alarm count reduction for

different values of the on-delay timer

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Overall Results
Tab.1:THE PERCENTAGE ALARM COUNT REDUCTION FOR EACH
ALARM W.R.T.THE ORIGINAL SETTINGS (seeTab.2)
Overall Count Reduction [%]
Deadband &
On-Delay
27.9
21.2
98.0
89.7
31.3
0.0
91.9

Deadband

On-Delay

4.7
12.9
0.0
85.2
18.8
0.0
90.5

26.7
17.7
98.0
31.1
31.3
0.0
64.7

Count Red. of Short Alarms

(up to 30 s) [%]
Deadband &
On-Delay
On-Delay
75.0
66.7
0.0
42.7
100.0
98.0
100.0
58.5
100.0
100.0
0.0
0.0
100.0
72.3

Count Red. of Closely Spaced

Alarms (up to 60 s) [%]
Deadband &
Deadband
On-Delay
44.4
11.1
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
99.7
99.0
100.0
100.0
0.0
0.0
98.8
95.3

The original deadband

already eliminates all
short and closely-spaced
alarms -> reduction of 0%
for the deadband.
Deadband has no effect
(set according to the
other alarms on the PV)

For on-delays: comparison with the

orig. on-delays and db=0 -> the
reduction seems higher than for the dbs

Implementation of both the deadband

and the on-delay yields improvement

Tab.2 DEADBAND AND ON-DELAY SETTINGS FOR EACH ALARM

PVName.Alarm

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Orig. OnDelay [s]

Recommended
On-Delay [s]

Orig. Deadband
[EUs]

Recommended
Deadband [EUs]

**FI***.PVLO

0.50

1.23

**LI***.PVHI

17

1.00

2.15

**LI***.PVLO

17

1.00

2.15

**F4***.PVHI

14

0.00

8.03

**T4***.PVHI

21

0.00

0.85

**T4***.PVLO

21

0.00

0.85

**F1***.PVLO

15

1.78

5.06

APC9 2011

Original settings:
no delay timers
deadbands for 3 variables
(corresponding to 1% of
the EU range)
Jerhotov, Stluka

Contents
Introduction & Project Scope
Mapping Symptoms to Actions
Method Verification
Conclusion

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Conclusion
The study confirmed the relationship between optimal deadband values
and estimated noise characteristics of individual PV signals.
The configuration tuning method was validated using a data set of 5
process variables spanned over 24 days.
Optimization of deadbands and on-delay timers resulted in the average
alarm count reduction of 51.4 % and the total alarm events count
reduction of 84.5 % w.r.t. the original settings (93.8 % w.r.t. the zerosettings)
The experimental results indicate that the proposed method may use
the PV data archived with the usual historian sampling period based on
variable dynamics (for instance for flow - sampling period of up to 30 s
is sufficient)

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www.honeywell.com

Thanks for your kind attention!

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