Designing, evaluating, and benchmarking auditory alarms for the chemical and oil processing industry

The auditory alarms used in oil and chemical processing control rooms are often based on practices and knowledge which is twenty to thirty years out of date, and therefore do not embody the significant progress that has been more recently made in this area. Best practice available from other areas (aviation, transport, and healthcare) can be brought to bear in improving and updating control room alarms as they share similar problems with alarms in those domains. This paper describes the processes of designing, benchmarking, and testing a series of sets of auditory alarms intended for use in control rooms by the oil and chemical processing industry. In particular, the work shows how important the localizability of alarms can be in practice, and how improved localizability can be designed into auditory alarms.