Identification of Most Critical Alarms for Alarm Flood Reduction
Md. Habibur Rahaman, Haniyeh Seyed Alinezhad, Tongwen Chen · IFAC-PapersOnLine · 2024
In complex processes, the activation of a single alarm can trigger a cascade of consequences that affect multiple interconnected components. As a result, the number of active alarms can increase rapidly. This sudden surge in alarms is often referred to as an alarm flood. Alarm floods are a common source of operational burden for operators, overwhelming them with a high volume of alarm notifications. If critical alarms are not promptly and accurately identified, decision-making processes can be undermined. This paper addresses these challenges by introducing a novel approach for identifying and prioritizing critical alarms from each alarm flood. Hidden Markov models are employed to construct a likelihood matrix that reveals the relationships among alarm variables, and identifies the most critical alarm from a directed acyclic graph. Case studies are conducted using a vinyl acetate monomer simulator to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The results highlight accurate identification and prioritization of critical alarms, enabling operators to focus on the most important process abnormalities.