Emerson vs. Honeywell at NPRA

One more thing of interest from last week’s NPRA meeting…

Following three papers focusing on Part One of Cybersecurity, there were three papers on abnormal situations:

·         One on Abnormal Situation Management (ASM)

·         One on Abnormal Situation Prevention (ASP)

·         And one on Alarm Management

All three related to the topic of improving reliability and safety, with slightly different angles.

Although not presented by Honeywell, the ASM paper continued on a theme long- promoted by Honeywell via the ASM Consortium.  ASM aims to identify problems facing plant operations during abnormal conditions, and to develop solution concepts.

The ASM paper was followed by an ASP paper from Emerson (Honeywell’s key competitor).

The key Emerson message was that traditional ASM solutions are too-after-the-fact and that ASP (with emphasis on the “P” for Prevention) are better suited to improve plant safety and reliability. 

Presumably, because the ASP solutions work down at the sensor level they can identify abnormal performance issues before those signals can even make it to the higher-level ASM applications.

So basically they are analyzing higher-frequency signal variations to detect abnormal situations. 

That might be fine for high-speed rotating and electrical equipment, but I doubt that it provides any improvement over the ASM techniques promoted by Honeywell for process drift and other non-high-frequency changes.

In the end, as is often the case, a combination of technologies is likely the right approach.

But that combination then also needs to include our much-talked about friend of alarm management.

Which was exactly the topic of the joint PAS / Chevron Phillips Chemical paper presented after the ASM and ASP updates.

All in all, a good mix of papers on improving safety and reliability.

Where to start as a customer?

ASP and ASM are both still more or less research areas, with benefits often subject to the eye of the beholder.

Alarm Management on the other hand is well-defined with clear benefits.  Check out a copy of the NPRA paper or read the book for more info on that.

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