Distinguishing Real vs. Maintenance Alarms

JoshM

Member
Join Date
Mar 2012
Location
NYC
Posts
54
Hi,

We do not use SCADA monitoring for a lot of reasons. We have control systems and have independent systems that monitor our processes. We developed this monitoring system in-house and have reached a problem and I would like to get some feedback from this forum. We have around 100 global sites, 1,000's of devices (generators, PDU's, SWBD's, UPS's, etc.), and 10,000's of points from the devices. We do a lot of scheduled maintenance on weekends, some on weekdays. Because we have so many sites with a lot of equipment we end up doing multiple device maintenance each weekend. We sometimes find that our facilities people miss alarms because they think regular alarms are just being generated due to maintenance. I was thinking about suppression, but my concern is this will introduce other problems.

Any thoughts or references to research/white papers, etc. would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your time.

-Josh
 
Sounds quite simple. Give your Monitoring people a copy of the work orders for each day and they can take time between naps to cross reference them. Or have someone add a module to your custom system to automatically cross reference the work orders.
:)
 
Sounds quite simple. Give your Monitoring people a copy of the work orders for each day and they can take time between naps to cross reference them. Or have someone add a module to your custom system to automatically cross reference the work orders.
:)


Thank you for your reply.

If it was only that simple...

We do not have "monitoring people", only people that respond to the alarms, but those are the people that do the maintenance too. I thought about having them stick to more of a schedule when they are doing maintenance, but they inform me that with the scale of some of these jobs it is hard to stick to a schedule and do it in a reasonable amount of time.

We can not add personnel either.
 
Our monitoring system is also separate from our SCADA. I gave our maint folks access to put systems/devices into downtime(which I get emailed about along w/ the maint manager).

So, They are responsible to put devices into downtime as they get around to working on them. I made it very simple for them.
 
Our monitoring system is also separate from our SCADA. I gave our maint folks access to put systems/devices into downtime(which I get emailed about along w/ the maint manager).

So, They are responsible to put devices into downtime as they get around to working on them. I made it very simple for them.

Thank you Dravik!

I'm glad other people are doing that. We built a similar thing, but call it suppression. We also made it so people could not take the unit down for that long of a period of time.

I am curious what other solutions people have implemented.
 
Thank you Dravik!

I'm glad other people are doing that. We built a similar thing, but call it suppression. We also made it so people could not take the unit down for that long of a period of time.

I am curious what other solutions people have implemented.

So what you are saying is that you have a cutout timer that reverts it back to normal after that amount of time. I think that is a must with these systems, so it isn't left in bypass, and therefore not protecting the system at all. I've seen that all too often where an operator or maintenance worker forgot it o n, and it led to bigger problems later on.
 
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In this second edition, Alarm Management: A Comprehensive Guide, various problems of alarm systems are covered with precise guidance on how they come about and how to effectively correct them. It is written by individuals with vast experience in the different plants, processes, and environments requiring effective alarm management. The second edition is filled with good examples and explanations of procedures, with practical lists and tips on how one should proceed. It is based on hundreds of successful projects.
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