ISA TR18.2.3

General applicability

This technical report addresses alarm systems for facilities inthe process industries to improve safety, quality, andproductivity.

In the design stage, the alarm attributes are specified anddesigned based on the requirements found in the alarm philosophyand determined by rationalization (e.g., alarm priority andsetpoint). There are three areas of design: basic alarm design, HMIdesign, and design of advanced alarming techniques. This technicalreport addresses considerations for the basic alarm design. Notethat HMI design detailed requirements and recommendations can befound in ISA-18.2 Clause 11 and guidance on advanced alarmingtechniques is provided in TR4.

Basic alarm design vs. enhanced and advanced alarmmethods

This technical report, TR3, addresses basic alarm design whileTR4 is focused on enhanced and advanced alarm methods. The purposeof this subclause is to provide clarity as to what methods andtechniques are treated as basic alarm design vs. those that aretreated as advanced alarm design. In general, basic alarm designprinciples should be applied first. In some cases though, such asdynamically changing processes (e.g., most batch processes),advanced techniques need to be considered up front. The use ofadvanced alarm design techniques typically carry with them addedcomplexity and cost, and as such, are typically applied only whenbasic techniques are inadequate to address the necessary alarmfunctionality.

Purpose of this technical report

This technical report provides details on the basic alarm designprocess described in ISA-18.2 Clause 10. Following the lifecyclemodel shown in Figure 1, this report assumes that alarms to beaddressed in basic alarm design have completed rationalizationwhere attributes such as alarm setpoint and priority have beendefined.

Edition:

15

Published:

06/12/2015

Number of Pages:

52

File Size:

1 file , 750 KB