An analytical alarm flood reduction to reduce operator's workload

Abstract

In the domain of process control, an alarm flood is a situation when there are more alarms generated by the automation system than can be physically addressed by a single operator. To reduce alarm floods an analytical approach, so called AADA (Automatic Alarm Data Analyzer), has been developed to learn these alarm floods by itself. Finally, this behavior can be integrated into process-visualizations which illustrate only the root cause of an abnormal plant state. To increase the operator's awareness during abnormal plant states, a combined approach of the ADDA and the 3D process visualization is presented in this paper. This approach has to reduce alarm floods and to display the most important information of a plant to the operator during runtime. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.