According to various surveys, plant operators receive far more alarms than they can handle on a normal basis. This is far more than the level required by new alarm standards (ISA 18.2, 2009 or EEMUA 2007). 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.

Our research group has concentrated on developing advanced techniques for the analysis and design of industrial alarm systems for years. Some of the research topics of the group include

• Alarm historian visualization and analysis
  • Visualization of alarm data
  • Analysis of run length distribution (RLD)
    • RLD-based delay-timer design
    • RLD-based plant oscillation detection
  • Analysis of alarm floods
    • Identification of alarm floods
    • Classification of alarm floods
    • Root cause analysis of alarm floods
• Process data-based alarm system analysis and rationalization
  • Process-data-based performance analysis
    • Analysis of false alarm rate and missed alarm rate
    • Analysis of detection delay
  • Design of alarm parameters based on process data
    • deadband
    • filter
    • delay-timer
    • alarm limit
• Plant connectivity and process variable causality analysis
  • Signed directed graphs (SDG) in alarm systems
  • Causality analysis
  • Fusion of process data and connectivity data
• Alarm management toolbox development

The following papers provide an introduction on the general topic of industrial alarm systems:

• W. Hu, S. L. Shah, T. Chen, Framework for a smart data analytics platform towards process monitoring and alarm management, Computers & Chemical Engineering, vol. 114, pp. 225-244, 2018, ISSN 0098-1354.

• H. R. M. Rao, T. Chen, and S. L. Shah, Advances in the Smart Data Analytics Framework: Integrating Data Extraction and Automated Reporting,  2024 IEEE 3rd Industrial Electronics Society Annual On-Line Conference (ONCON), Beijing, China, 2024, Art. No. 10931649.

• I. Izadi, S.L. Shah, D.S. Shook, and T. Chen, An Introduction to Alarm Analysis and Design, Proceedings of the 7th IFAC SAFEPROCESS, pp. 645-650, Barcelona, Spain, 2009.

• I. Izadi, S.L. Shah, and T. Chen, Effective Resource Utilization for Alarm Management, proceedings of the 49th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, pp. 6803-6808, Atlanta, GA, 2010.