System and Configuration Management

Total solution approach

Managing changes in the process control system are critical to integrity and lifecycle costs and management. System Advisor for Process Control provides significant Change Management functions:

I/O Management automatically documents when I/O channels have been used
System Health Monitoring for network and controllers
Change Tracking for all changes to system with auditing and documentation
Operator Action Journal with statistical analysis and reports

A powerful feature of System Advisor for Process Control is the ability to perform integrity checks and send emails when conditions occur. The main categories of checks include:

Missing native and 3rd party references
Inactive blocks and blocks in manual/local
Alarm integrity Issues
Database integrity issues
Peer-to-peer connections and read/writes

Alarm Management

System Advisor for Process Control follows the EEMUA Standard and Recommendations for Alarm Management. The alarm system can be documented using System Advisor’s master alarm database, which documents the proper alarm configuration and the potential impacts, causes, and consequences of the alarms. System Advisor for Process Control can be configured to quickly alert users to changes made to alarms and what the differences are between the actual versus master alarm documentation. The alarm statistics included are:

Raw listing of alarms
Most frequent alarms
Alarms per time period
Chattering, flooding, and standing alarms
Time to acknowledge
Correlate, inhibited, and configured alarms