Welcome to the portal of the Advanced Alarm Management and Design research group at the University of Alberta. Our group focuses on advanced research and development in the area of complex industrial alarm systems. Our research activities are currently funded by an NSERC Alliance Grant, with industrial partners Syncrude Canada, and Enbridge (and previously by NSERC Collaborative Research and Development Grant with Suncor Energy also an industrial partner.)

Industrial plants are susceptible to faults at every level of their operations. To avoid any unsatisfactory performance, industrial plants are monitored closely to detect possible faults. Detection of a fault often results in an alarm to inform the operator about the abnormality. The development of industrial distributed control systems (DCS) and the availability of software alarms have made it easy to add many alarms at no cost. This has caused a substantial increase in the number of alarms configured in a plant (usually in the range of tens of thousands). Consequently, according to various surveys, plant operators receive far more alarms than they can handle on a normal basis. As a result, there has recently been an increasing interest in the industry to address this issue and seek remedies to reduce the number of false and nuisance alarms.