Thursday 2 September 2010

Guide to alarm management

The definitive guide to best practices for effective alarm management and a concise summary of the new ISA standard

PAS has recently published the second edition of The Alarm Management Handbook by Eddie Habibi, PAS Founder and CEO, and Bill Hollifield, PAS Alarm Management Principal Consultant. It is the most comprehensive best-practices book available for designing and maintaining an effective alarm management system.

Ineffective alarm systems continue to haunt the processing and power industries worldwide, contributing to plant upsets and shutdowns. Alarm management improvement has been identified by many industrial companies as a critical business and safety improvement imperative in recent years. In response to this market need, PAS published the first edition of The Alarm Management Handbook in 2006. With the release of the new ANSI/ISA-18.2-2009 Management of Alarm Systems for the Process Industries, PAS has updated the book to incorporate the ideas presented in it. This new standard sets forth the work processes for designing, implementing, operating, and maintaining a modern alarm system in a life-cycle format. The 2nd edition includes a summary of the standard’s scope, regulatory impact, requirements, recommendations, and other details.

The new edition also includes much additional practical information on benchmarking alarm system performance, developing a comprehensive alarm philosophy, solving nuisance alarm problems, performing alarm rationalization, implementing advanced alarm handling techniques, and improving the operator HMI for optimum situation awareness and incident mitigation.

“The Alarm Management Handbook is a very practical guide to implementing an alarm management program, presented in a unique and entertaining style,” says Nicholas P. Sands, ISA-18 Co-Chair. “This edition provides new information, and ties the guidance in the previous edition to the new ISA-18.2 standard.”

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