An Overview of Industrial Alarm Systems: Main Causes for Alarm Overloading, Research Status, and Open Problems

Towards alarm flood reduction

“…Laumonier, J.-M. Faure, member IEEE, J.-J. Lesage, member IEEE, and H. Sabot abnormality propagating through a system, is also proposed in [4], but no technique to reduce the alarm flood is proposed. In [5], several rules to filter or suppress alarms for a nuclear power plant reactor by analyzing alarm datasets are described.…”

“…In [4], a survey on industrial alarm systems is proposed; the issues linked to the alarm flood are listed and the underlying research problems are outlined. It appears that one of the main difficulty in alarm management is to know whether the cause of the overflow comes from the alarm configuration step, the alarm design step or the alarm removal step.…”

On integration of feedback control and safety systems: Analyzing two chemical process applications

“…Several recent works have proposed a systems perspective on process safety (e.g., [3,20,22,36]) which encourages engineers to consider process incidents as events that occur due to a migration of the process state, over time, to conditions at which an accident may occur (this may be applicable, for example, in the case of reactor thermal runaway). Traditional approaches to process safety like process design modifications neglect important aspects impacting process operational safety, such as multivariable interactions of process components and variables, limited control system authority due to limitations on the capacity of control actuators, and the manner in which the safety or relief system response may impact the effectiveness of the process control system [20,40]. Accounting for such aspects in the control and safety system designs can be crucial to ensuring process operational safety.…”

Validation of similarity measures for industrial alarm flood analysis?

“…The phenomenon of alarm flooding is a recurring problem in industrial plant operation [19]. It occurs when the frequency of alarm annunciations is so high that it exceeds the operators capability of understanding the situation.…”