A survey of North American and European process plants was conducted to understand how highly managed alarms (specified in ISA18.2) are determined. Company firewalls made delivery of the survey difficult. One-third of the respondents were still in the process of developing their alarm management standard. Several respondents specifically did not designate any alarms as HMA lest they activate the requirements of ISA18.2.
Highly Managed Alarms (HMAs) is a special group of alarms that require more administration and documentation than regular process alarms. HMAs are also referred to as safety alarms in the industry. ISA 18.2 specifies HMAs as classes of alarms that are critical to process safety, personnel protection, environmental protection, etc. ISA18.2 does not prescribe the applications of HMAs or how HMAs should be implemented for the facility. Operator corrective action of HMAs are used as safeguards to mitigate the risk that was identified during safety review or HAZOP process. In general, the consequence of missing a HMA alarm is severe. Consequently, the lifecycle management of HMAs are crucial for the successful facility alarm management.
In the absence of any industry-standard defining the implementation of HMA, the operating companies have been implementing HMAs in different ways. A hard approach for implementation would require significant cost and resources. Conversely, an easy approach with the implementation may result in not mitigating the associated risk sufficiently. The proposed survey is to identify the current practices of HMA lifecycle management and document them for use in developing further research. The outcome of the survey results will benefit the operating companies by helping them understand the current industry practices and modify it as necessary for the best application.
How and to what degree is the industry applying the requirements of ISA18.2 regarding highly managed alarms
HMAs, also known as safety alarms, are widely used as an operator safeguard to mitigate the risk identified through the safety review or HAZOP process. An example of an HMA alarm is Independent Protection Layer (IPL) alarm. Typically IPL alarms are identified through Layer of Protection Analysis (LOPA). Other type of HMA are personnel protection alarms, environmental protection alarms, Safety Instrumented System (SIS) related alarms and fire & gas alarms. Since the consequence of missing HMA is severe, the lifecycle management of HMA is crucial. In order to keep higher a level of integrity and reliability of HMAs, the requirements for HMAs are more stringent than regular process alarms. Current industry standards lack details on the implementation of HMAs. Operating companies have implemented HMAs in different formats – for an example, using a dedicated system to generate HMAs and a dedicated external annunciator to display HMAs – and hence require an industry baseline to optimize the benefits of HMAs.
Execute HMA survey
Analyze results