Trouble-Shooting guides is the term many folks use to for the list of steps and decisions necessary to tale when a deviation from the normal opertion occurs. It is what an operator does to prevent a deviation from leading to an emergency shutdown or worse. (Trouble-Shooting guides are significant extensions of waht some call Operating Limits Tables.) The standard way we teach and coach for developing Trouble-Shooting guides is to use PHA/HAZOP tables as a starting point. Then, the learnings from the PHA/HAZOP can make it to the operating staff in useable (user friendly) form and language. These Toruble-Shooting guides then become the basis for training of operators on many things, but especially how to respond to a critical alarm. See the paper on our website:
… that explains how to write effective procedures (a free download; had been the cover-issue of Chemical Engineering Magazing in about 1997. The second half of the paper describes how to extract info from the HAZOP tables to create the starting point for Trouble-Shooting guides.
A new trend is to include such guides within the basic process control system (BPCS, or DCS) so that when a critical alarm comes on, the operator can decision to click on an icon to display the related guide. This is much easier to use than opening another program to find the guide or turning pages in a book to find the guide.
