Baseera System for Digitalization of Alarm Management in PDO
Authors: Al Harrasi Ibtihaj Said , Al Naumani Yahya Hamood 
Published: February 2024

The monitoring of controlled operation alarms in the oil and gas industry is crucial and challenging. Alarms are one of the key factors used to monitor operational performance. In 2015, PDO was dealing with more than 100,000 alarms per day from 64 assets with different DCS systems. To achieve top quartile performance, PDO must maintain alarm per operator KPIs at best industry practice. As Jun Liu et al. [3] note, "poor performance of existing alarm systems actually puts lives at risk and contributes to major plant damage, production loss, and environmental impact, leading to losses of millions."

Alarms are collected, prioritized and historized by modern control technologies such as Distributed Control System (DCS). A DCS is a centralized intelligent control system with multiple nodes and I/O devices connected via a dedicated network. There are three major challenges in DCS related to the analysis of alarms: Alarm data is not visible to non-system engineers/operators. This limits the ability of other personnel to understand and analyze alarms, which can lead to delays in responding to critical events.DCS is not designed to gather long-term historical data on alarms. This means that data older than six months cannot be retrieved for trending analysis. This can make it difficult to identify patterns and trends in alarm data that could be used to improve operational performance.Due to the lack of a common interface between different DCS providers, end users cannot have a holistic overview of facility performance. This can make it difficult to identify and address common alarm-related problems across different facilities.

These challenges highlight the need for improved alarm management solutions in the oil and gas industry. Solutions that address these challenges could help to improve operational safety, efficiency, and reliability.

The Control and Automation Department at Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) has developed a dedicated dashboard called Baseera, an Arabic word meaning "insight," to tackle the issue of data unification, model-guided analytics, and simplified visualization of big data related to alarm management, process health, and system diagnostics. Baseera is a web-based portal designed using Tableau, a business intelligence and analytics software.

The development of Baseera faced several challenges, including unstructured data, the lack of system redundancy, and a firewall between the Office Domain (OD, the end-user network) and the Process Control Domain (PCD, the source of the data). First, the Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL) layer within Baseera was used to improve the structured data. Second, a high availability of Baseera was achieved through the installation of Tableau Server, a special type of distributed installation designed to accommodate failure in key server components without loss of complete server functionality. Third, the collaboration between Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server enabled the data to flow from the PCD (source) to the OD (destination) through the firewall.