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Beville Engineering - refinery and petrochemical industry leader in human factors engineering  

 

 

 

 

workload, alarms, upset response, staffing for pipelines, refineries, chemical plants

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steady state workload, alarms, upset response, staffing for pipelines, refineries, chemical plants
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Services: staffing, workload, upset reponse, display design, alarm management, consolidation, modernization
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RECENT NEWS
Beville Engineering, in conjunction with Wright State University, is proud to announce the debut of the Center for Operator Performance.

The Center is an alliance of academic and process companies to research generic issues in human factors and process operator performance. Visit the website for more information.

OUR METHOD
Our approach is one of tailoring our services to our clients' needs, rather than trying to adjust our clients to fit our methods.

We implement an on-site, "hands-on" approach to gauge the causes of problems, and then seek to solve the problems through the manipulation of various workload and human performance variables.

ON-SITE AUDIT
One day on-site plant audit now available. View info.
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Alarm Management / Alarm Response Analysis

Beville Engineering, Inc., has been conducting alarm response analyses in the petrochemical industry for the past 18 years. As such, we have developed a comprehensive approach and methodology that has enabled significant improvements in alarm systems for a variety of clients. The following highlight some of our results: 

  • A reduction of alarms per day from 300 to 100
  • A decrease in emergency priority alarms from 40 to 13 percent of the alarm total
  • A reduction of alarms "in" during normal operations from an average of 15 to 0
  • An 80 percent reduction in the number of emergency alarm activations

Alarm system management is universally recognized as essential to ensuring that processing plants are run safely and efficiently. Alarm system management is are also universally recognized as being problematic. It is ironic that a system that is so essential is often the source of so many problems. Stories of operators missing or misunderstanding alarms and wreaking havoc on a process are all too familiar. There are tell-tale signs that an alarm system is poorly configured. Characteristics of poorly configured alarm systems include:

Alarms that have no operator action,

  • Alarm conditions that have multiple alarms,
    Alarms that are "in" during normal operations, violation of the "dark screen" principle,
  • Alarm actuation rates in excess of the operator's information processing capabilities,
  • Alarms with improper setpoints or deadband, causing alarm cycling,
  • Excessively high alarm-to-controller ratios, and
  • Alarm priority distribution that has too many emergency and high priority alarms and too few low priority alarms.

Although problems with alarm system management may be easy to identify, identifying the solutions to the problems is not so simple without a substantial amount of knowledge and experience. Conceptually, selecting alarms is not difficult: each alarm should prompt a unique operator action. If there is no action, there should be no alarm. If multiple alarms all prompt the same action, there shouldn’t be more than one alarm.

Systematic application of this principle is done through an alarm response analysis (ARA). All of the pertinent data for each point to be alarmed is entered into a customized database form during the ARA. The data that is captured is then used to determine what points need to be alarmed, deleted or changed. This method of cataloging each point's data provides documentation for any changes that are made and works as a control for future alarm additions. The ARA form becomes part of the management of change for alarms. 

Several rules-of-thumb exist for determining if the alarm selection process was successful. The total number of alarms for a system should be a 2.5:1 ratio of alarms to controllers. For example, a unit with 200 controllers should have about 500 alarms. These alarms should have a priority distribution of the following: 

Level 1 - 10%
Level 2 - 35%
Level 3 - 55%

staffing, workload, modernization, consolidation, display design, alarm management  OUR SERVICES
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ABOUT US
Beville is an Ohio-based human factors engineering firm that was formed in 1983.
OUR EXPERTISE
Workload
Staffing studies
Modernization  studies
Alarm management studies
Alarm and display system design, configuration and management.
HUMAN FACTORS ENGINEERING
Human factors engineering is the scientific discipline dedicated to improving the human-machine interface and human performance through the application of knowledge on human strengths, weaknesses, and characteristics.

For more information, click here...

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