Access to Daily DCS Alarm Reports in Oil and Gas Facilities

This topic is of benefit to a lot of end users in the Process Industry, where alarm management is key. It would be great if someone can 

• Share some best practices and experiences with capturing various kinds of alarms & other messages that are generated by different source systems such as DCS, SIS, BMS etc. in CDF
• Throw more light on leveraging CDF for determining Alarm Metrics, Reports & KPIs

Hi @KC Goh ,

Thank you for posting this question.

Could you kindly provide additional details so that we can provide a response to this question?

• Name of the system
• Version of the system
• Available API
• Is there any interfaces that we can used in order to extract the data?

Regards,
Dilini

Thank you for your follow up.    My question was to the Community: “Has anybody any experience extracting a list of DCS Process Alerts to Operators or Operator Overrides on an Hourly or Daily basis into CDF ?   This data resides in the OT and is sometimes extracted and made available in reports in the IT domain, e.g., by Yokogawa.” I would be interested in experience within this community of pulling “Sequence of Events” or “Alarm” Information into CDF, either for overall event overviews or as “Events”.    As for specific examples of DCS/PLC systems or Third Party Systems which provide Alarms Management info into the IT: https://www.exida.com/Alarm-Management/Detail/rockwell-automation-plantpax-system-services and https://www.yokogawa.com/us/solutions/solutions/asset-operations-and-optimization/alarm-management/#Overview.    Happy to discuss this further.   I have also mentioned this to your colleague Jason Dressel.

Tagging @Hunter Beck on this. Hunter, this is a use case of CDF that is of benefit to a number of process/manufacturing industries. Developing standards and best practices of mapping the alarms and other events generated by different automation systems, into upcoming FDM properly, will be of great benefit to number of us in the industry.

Thanks for tagging me on this @rsiddha! We’ve certainly modeled these sort of alarms as events in the past, though that has limitations on filtering/querying that FDM will dramatically improve.

Definitely see the benefit in reference guides, and after the release of FDM to General Availability, we’re planning to work on lots of reference guides for common data models. No need to reinvent the wheel if industry standards or common patterns already exist. 
 

Out of curiosity @rsiddha and @KC Goh, what sort of volumes of these alarms would you anticipate from a typical process unit? And what sort of information would you typically report on: criticality, frequency, location, type, etc? 
 

FYI @Arun Arunachalam @Anders Hafreager 

HI @rsherif @KC Goh checking in to see if you would like to add information as per Hunter’s questions above? 

Hunter wrote: “what sort of volumes of these alarms would you anticipate from a typical process unit? And what sort of information would you typically report on: criticality, frequency, location, type, etc? “.   As I understand it:

• A medium sized facility may have up to 5000 alarms, trip or maintenance override notifications per day if there are issues.  Typically, would like to have less than 6 (?) per hour per Operator ( - Depends on Operating Company).
• It is of value to report hourly or daily summaries, or by shift: counts per time period.
• Each event in the DCS / SIS will have Tag numbers associated with them, so can be contextualized in the usual ways.

Suggest to arrange a call.

Being able to track and report alarm KPI’s, as described in ISA 18.2 would be of benefit. Having a call would be great. 

@Hunter Beck @Anita Hæhre Are there any updates on this topic worth sharing ?    Surely by now, we will have some examples of linking in DCS and Safeguarding System alarm / alert data into CDF ?    Even if we do not have direct links to the DCS alarm logs etc., I have very well structured daily Excel reports on the Alarm Statistics from the DCS (and much other key operational data form Operations) and I suspect that by now we have much more experience on to get such daily Excel based information into CDF systematically. 

@Gunnar Staff , @Jason Dressel : You will recall us discussing this last year too.