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Alarm rationalisation is the process of reviewing and assessing each alarm to ensure it is necessary, appropriately configured, and that it adds value to the operator’s decision-making process. During this process, each alarm is scrutinised to determine whether it should be active, its appropriate priority, and the conditions under which it should trigger.
Alarm rationalisation is a critical step in preventing alarm overload, where operators are saturated with too many alarms, leading to desensitisation and the potential for critical alarms to be missed. By rationalising alarms, organisations can significantly reduce the number of unnecessary alarms, improve operator response times, and ultimately enhance safety and efficiency.
Before diving into the benefits, it’s essential to understand what alarm definition templates are. Essentially, these templates are standardised information sets that capture all necessary information about an alarm. This information typically includes the alarm’s supporting information including, priority, potential causes, operator actions, and any other relevant details. The purpose of these templates is to improve the efficiency of alarm rationalisation and enable a consistent and complete approach in how alarm types are defined, managed, and documented across the entire system.
