Late last year, ARC Advisory Group conducted a survey on current practices and trends in alarm management in the process industries. Within that survey, we also wanted to learn how end users, suppliers, consultants and system integrators are approaching the often-challenging issue of migrating existing alarm management applications.
Alarm management in general continues to be a big issue in process plants, driven largely by the need to conform to current standards and best practices like ISA 18.2, EEMUA 191 and IEC 62682. The primary goal of these standards and practices is to develop a continuous improvement approach to alarm management and ease the alarm burden on operators so they see only the information they need to see, particularly during process upsets or other abnormal situations.
但是，遵守标准和最佳实践并不是当今最终用户面临的唯一问题。高级警报管理系统已在市场上可用多年。随着最终用户越来越多地看到有必要从其旧的警报管理应用程序中迁移到他们过时的情况下，许多人也将其作为改善其警报管理理念并实施这些系统的一些新方面的机会，例如动态警报可以随着植物的动态变化状态而改变锁定步骤。
ARC收到了170多个对调查的回应。接近一半的受访者是最终用户，顾问占19％以上。供应商代表了约17.5％的回应，其中包括OEM和制定的设备制造商和系统集成商在内。尽管并非所有受访者都回答了所有调查问题，但我们确实指出了回答中的一般一致性，无论是最终用户，供应商还是第三方。我们认为这很重要。
在一个行业基础上,最大的响应es came from the oil and gas sector (more than 24 percent), while petrochemicals and bulk chemicals accounted for 19 percent of responses. Regionally, most respondents were from North America and Western Europe. On a whole, these regions have the largest installed base of advanced alarm management applications.
Most survey respondents had recently implemented a new alarm management and rationalization project at their company or facility; many on a companywide basis. Clearly, there is still a lot of activity in alarm management and rationalization, and ARC believes this effort will only escalate over the next few years. Not only do many end users face the need to migrate from older alarm management platforms, but other users who have not yet implemented advanced alarm management solutions will embark on new projects.
More than 35 percent of respondents were taking existing applications and applying minor upgrades. The rest were fairly evenly distributed among those who were implementing brand new projects, those who were migrating to a new solution from a new supplier, and those who were migrating to a new solution from the same supplier.
大多数受访者（72％）表示他们遵循ISA 18.2标准。这与调查人群一致，因为该标准在北美非常受欢迎。但是，显然，北美以外的许多用户也遵循该标准。接近20％的受访者表示，他们遵循IEC 62682标准，该标准紧随ISA 18.2。
ARC要求受访者简要描述他们在警报管理项目实施方面面临的三个主要挑战。尽管我们对这个开放式问题的回答有很多不同的回答，但我们能够确定在其余部分中脱颖而出的三个主要挑战。
Challenge 1: Getting management buy-in and allocating resources.列出的许多主要挑战都涉及人类问题，例如从运营商和管理人员那里获得买入，并找到有效地完成该项目的适当时间，资源和培训。成本和资金问题也很普遍。实际执行项目的警报合理化方面也被列为主要挑战。
挑战2：缺乏主题专家。Secondary challenges also included human issues such as buy-in, ease of use and basic issues such as time and resources. However, we start to see more specific technical and implementation challenges as secondary issues, such as alarm philosophy development challenges, configuration issues, developing or redefining key performance indicators (KPIs) and database issues. People issues also start to become more specific, such as finding sufficient subject matter experts (SMEs), developing common work processes and procedures across the enterprise, and resistance to change by operator and other personnel.
Challenge 3: Alarm rationalization and consistency.我们仍然看到一些成本和资源问题重复为第三级挑战，但是也列出了更具体的面向人员和技术问题，例如使警报合理化的最新，变更管理以及实施动态警报。在处理不同的数据来源时，在警报管理中达到一致性也是一个关键挑战。
ARC welcomes you to share your own thoughts on this important topic. Please feel free to contact the author atlobrien@arcweb.com.
>>Larry O’Brien is vice president of research forARC Advisory Group, responsible for providing oversight in ARC’s research into process automation markets, including process automation systems, process safety systems, plant asset management systems, intelligent device management strategies and field networks.
