RESOURCES
Alarm Management Industry Standards & Guidelines
A properly managed alarm system has become an integral and critical part of any production and process facility.
EEMUA 191 since it was first published in 1999 has become the de facto global standard to which industry looks for guidance and good practice for alarm management systems.
To establish a system based on the EEMUA 191 guidelines or merely ascertain if a current system is working effectively and within the guidelines alarm data must be continuously collected and analysed. With the many disparate sources of alarm data from multiple control system vendors, just collecting data can be a challenge in itself. Bringing this data into a usable form for the Control Room Operator and reporting for Alarm Managers are two distinct but equally important functions.
The Engineering Equipment and Material Users Association based in the UK, produced and published the EEMUA 191 guidelines in 1999, updating them in 2007 and again in 2014. The guide is not a standard or regulation, but since its first publication, EEMUA 191 has become the globally accepted and leading guide to good practice for alarm management.
The Health and Safety Executive is the UK national independent watchdog for work-related health, safety and illness. They are an independent regulator and act in the public interest to reduce work-related death and serious injury across Great Britain’s workplaces.
The International Electrotechnical Commission is a leading global organization that publishes consensus-based International Standards and manages conformity assessment systems for electric and electronic products, systems and services, collectively known as electrotechnology. IEC publications serve as a basis for national standardisation and as references when drafting international tenders and contracts. In 2014 the IEC published IEC 62682 – Management of alarm systems for the process industries.
The Abnormal Situation Management consortium is a group of leading companies and universities invloved with process industries that have jointly invested in research and development to create knowledge, tools and products designed to prevent. detect and mitigate abnormal situations that affect process safety in the control operations environment.
In 2003 the ISA (International Society of Automation) assembled a working group to draft recommendations for practice or standards for PCS alarm systems. This work was underpinned by the recommendations of the EEMUA 191 and intended to provide clearer explanations for many of the practices within the EEMUA. The first edition of the ANSI/ISA Standard for Management of Alarm Systems in the Process Industries was published in 2009. In 2016 a second edition was published, with improvements based on progressing insight and adoption of the standard in the industry.