The human information processing system (better known as our "attention span") will choose and arrange sensory input to focus on the appropriate thoughts or behaviors while avoiding unnecessary distractions. Our attention can only handle so much.
When energy companies deal with alarm fatigue, workers are subject to various alarms (alerts) and consequently become desensitized to them; This leads to longer response times and missed alarm warnings. Alarm control and management are vital to avoiding alarm fatigue.
The pressure for field personnel to multi-task is high yet focusing on more than one task at a time is very difficult. Alarm fatigue increases the chances of an actual leak going undetected, resulting in significant damages to the environment lease property, revenue, and presenting a hazardous situation until the leak is caught, repaired, remediated.
Your solution to help reduce false alarms
With Emerson's Zedi Pipeline Leak, our system reduces the high cost of false alarms and regulatory fines by quickly reacting to leaks and other abnormal system operations that can rapidly consume profits endanger safety.
The system is engineered with machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce a leaks' impact due to earlier detection. Though it does not and cannot eliminate leaks; it acts as a powerful supplement to your existing leak detection methods and overall asset integrity management system.
Once implemented, a company can monitor data through an existing SCADA system or Emerson's Zedi Cloud SCADA. Our web-based interface is a secure, scalable cloud-based IIoT platform for remote SCADA monitoring, control, and optimization at your site. Field personnel can also utilize Zedi Go mobile app to enter, monitor and manage operational data with anywhere, anytime access.
It's known that when combined with SCADA, a computational leak detection system can reduce the average response time of a leak from 9 hours down to 2.1 hours (estimated).
Detect small leaks
Recently, a customer inundated with approximately 40 alarms per month — more than once per day. Because very few of these alarms indicated an actual leak, field personnel experienced "alarm fatigue" ignoring alarms and began ignoring alarms.
To overcome alarm fatigue, the operator tried taking readings less often. However, this approach increased the risk of delay in finding a leak. The operator also considered factoring in a 10% margin of error when comparing input/output volumes but was concerned that even with fewer readings, false alarms would still exist, and field personnel would develop a new threshold for alarm fatigue.
We recommended a trial to test our solution, and during the test phase, the system correctly identified all three withdrawal rates as leaks within a few minutes. It is also able to accurately identify normal pipeline flow transitions without creating alarms.
Once the testing phase was over, the customer implemented the solution to their internal system while utilizing the Zedi Alarm Management Service to reduce alarm fatigue with effective alarm management.
