Engineered systems high-performance buildings / building automation: Proactive bas alarming for high-performance buildings

An article published in the January 2011 issue of Building Automation, discussed the way alarms resulted in reactive operations and the way predictive control and fault detection diagnostics formed part of the solution to energy efficient and high performance building operation. Another use was to use a proactive approach to alarms and some of the steps that needed to be considered included prioritize all alarms, considering risk and priority, providing the operators with actionable steps to resolve the alarms, verifying that an alarm had been properly resolved after a specified time interval, and acknowledging operators who properly resolved alarms. It was necessary to prioritize the alarms to start implementing a proactive alarm management process. Criteria to consider when prioritizing alarms included risk and priority of the equipment, considering the core mission of the organization.