The control room in any process industry including petroleum refineries is the brain of the plant and alarms are considered the nerves of the system. Therefore, designing an appropriate alarm system could minimize the likelihood of accidents occurring. In this paper the effort has been taken to evaluate and improve the existing system by rationalizing the alarms and by using more advanced tools. The evaluation was limited to analysis of one of the workstations of a refinery located in Northern Europe. A four-week detail study combined with a four-month overview of the alarm history has been used for the study. The results of the study show that, in general, the alarm system is safe and the operators interact well with it. However, some weaknesses have been found with a possibility of improvement. The improvements suggested dealt with removing unnecessary alarms, changing their limits or priority, adding some equipment and considering a logical processing of alarms. The Identification of the problems was based on their activation rate and the assessment of their relative importance. In many cases, good improvements are achievable through minor changes in the process.
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