Intelligent Alarm Management Through Suppressing Nuisance Alarms and Providing Operator Advice

Abstract Nuisance alarms often clutter and obscure an operator's view of critical and important information. In this paper, an intelligent alarm management system for a refinery plant is presented. Its function includes nuisance alarm suppression, intelligent advisory information to guide operator response, and result recovery mechanism in case of system failure. This system is implemented on Distributed Control System (DCS) and validated in real online tests. The results show that nuisance alarms are effectively suppressed and the DCS alarm system becomes more helpful.