University of Alberta joins ASM Consortium

The University of Alberta has joined the ASM Consortium as a university member, to help the consortium build knowledge through research related to reducing and mitigating abnormal situations in process industries, particularly in the area of alarm management.

 The University of Alberta is ASM’s first new member in 2012, giving the ASM Consortium a membership of 14.  This increased level of resource and knowledge will further strengthen the ASM Consortium’s work in the field of process safety, reliability and efficient operations.

One of Canada’s top teaching and research universities, the University of Alberta has an international reputation for collaboration with industry and community.

The University of Alberta will be represented by Sirish Shah and Tongwen Chen, both professors in the Faculty of Engineering. Shah has been awarded a Synergy Award for Innovation from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). His research has been recognized by NSERC executive management as “one of the best models for applied collaborative research. Chen is an IEEE Fellow and an international expert on computer control and networked systems. Professors Shah and Chen have jointly led a research team at the University of Alberta to develop advanced tools for industrial alarm monitoring; their work has been supported by an NSERC strategic project with Matrikon, Suncor, and Imperial Oil as industrial partners.”

The ASM Consortium started in 1994 to address customer concerns about the high cost of incidents at their plants such as unplanned shutdowns, fires, explosions, emissions, etc., and this was termed Abnormal Situation Management.