Alarm Analysis (Exaplog)

• Operational Excellence by Asset Maximization, Utilizing Yokogawa's DCS, SIS, Analyzers, and Field Instruments.
• The CENTUM VP PCS and ProSafe-RS SIS were integrated using the same engineering environment.
• Nearly 60 gas chromatographs and a large number of other types of analyzers in several analyzer houses.

Thai Acrylic Fibre Co., Ltd. (TAF) was established in 1987 and is currently a leading acrylic fiber manufacturer in the ASEAN region with 450 employees. It produces a wide range of acrylic fiber productions with varied deniers and the annual production recorded 77,000 megatons in 2004 which is five times the production rate at the time of establishment.

Alarm management is not just a project that has a start and end date; it's a continuous cycle. Once the alarm system has been reviewed and improvements have been identified, we must check that controls are in place to ensure the alarm system remains functional. The key is to ensure that the system is continuously monitored and any changes are fully documented. There are seven key steps for alarm management. Rationalization is one of those critical steps.

Large process industry companies have recently started building plants with world-class safety and profitability to reinforce their competitive edge in the global market. As for plant operations, support functions for improving operators' plant operation skills and for extending operators' maximum capability are required to the DCS so that an operator can expand the area of plant monitoring or operate a plant with higher cost- consciousness.

As plant operation becomes more intelligent and complex, the alarm system for safe and stable operation is becoming increasingly important. An alarm warns operators of an abnormal situation in a process and urges them to respond to it.

In recent years, safety and profitability have become ever more important in the process industry due to fierce global competition. Greater emphasis is being placed on highly efficient plant operation for reducing the increasing energy bill.

In 1999, Yokogawa Electric Corporation formed an alliance with Shell Global Solutions International B.V. (SGSI) in Advanced Process Control (APC), and both companies have since jointly developed products. This alliance successfully combined SGSI's experience gained through more than 800 projects in more than 30 years and Yokogawa's great deal of experience with the process control market, and strengthened the scheme to provide the APC technology.

September 2007

Yokogawa's web-based DCS Anywhere has simplified commissioning at the Nanhai petrochemicals complex. With a total investment of 4.2 billion US dollars, the Nanhai petrochemicals complex at Daya Bay in Huizhou, China, has attracted a lot of attention because of its sheer scale.

Exaquantum/ARA is a comprehensive set of statistical reports and KPIs based upon ISA 18.2-2009 & EEMUA 191.  Alarm and Events can be aggregated by hour, day, shift, week, month, quarter and year providing alarm rates, counts, peaks, floods, etc. Exaquantum/ARA can be used to reduce the number of unwanted and distracting alarms allowing operators to react faster to abnormal situations with the proper corrective action, resulting in a safer and more productive plant, reduced environmental risk, enhanced maintenance response; Reduction in the amount of equipment damage.  This package is part of our Alarm Management suite that utilizes software tools, alarm rationalization processes, and alarm philosophy generation as part of the solution aimed at reducing operator stress, operator overload prevention, and providing KPI information to key stakeholders on demand and by emails facilitating efficient and timely decision making.

Exaquantum is a comprehensive Plant Information Management System (PIMS) incorporating a data historian for real time and historical data, alarms, and events along with aggregations, role-based views and KPIs, graphical HMI, trends, reports, and integration with different systems.  It provides a cetralized repository for users throughout the plant and is the foundation for most of Yokogawa's production, safety, and alarm optimization solutions and operator effectiveness solutions. Exaquantum can acquire data from all facets of a process and transform that data into easily usable, high-value actionable information that can be made avaialable across the enterprise.

Exaquantum/SER is a unified sequence of events recorder solution that provides a plantwide integrated view of alarms, events and associated process data.  It identfies, collects, and processes alarms, events and process data related to plant trips from systems throughout the plant (DCS, historians, PIMS, PLCs, process automataion controllers, SCADA systems, safety systems, etc.) and stores the created information in an open and portable database. It can be used to provide trip detection based upon specific plant conditions and provide a full log of all relevant process information in the crucial period before and after a plant event.  Exaquantum/SER's plantwide integrated view can be used for peformance analysis and in aiding investigation teams in performing root cause analysis and problem identification. This solution assists in the elimination or reduction in the number of unexpected incidents and trips while increasing availability and production.