HE00675 - Alarm Management Strategies on Ships Bridges and Railway Control Rooms, A Comparison of Approaches and Solutions

This paper compares and contrasts alarm management approaches from rail and maritime sectors and seeks to distil best practice from both industries for application to robust, usable and pragmatic alarm management for these hazardous environments.

Shipborne systems and railway control rooms share many similarities with respect to alarms. Historically, these operating environments have seldom taken full advantage of a systematic approach to alarm management. As a result, operators continue to complain of additional workload, stress, alarm flooding and masking caused by excessive numbers of unnecessary, spurious or repetitive alarms, leading to difficulties in identifying the true priority for an alarm. At a basic level alarms must identify the status of systems and indicate to the operator what needs to be done and the urgency of the failure.