Alarm flood

Alarm flooding is the phenomenon of presenting more alarms in a given period of time than a human operator can effectively respond. (reference ...).

Most of the incident investigations performed by the US Chemical Safety Board (CSB) cite alarm floods as being a significant contributing cause to industrial incidents. In fact, alarm management has become identified as one of the key issues listed on the cover of recent CSB investigation reports. ( Reference ...)

Preventing alarm flood

ISA/ANSI 18.2 requires preventing alarm flood by sorting and aggregation of alarm signals of a single source. The method proposed here is to obtain patterns of the system behavior following a trigger.

Getting patterns of the response to triggers

To aggregate alarms of a single source, the machine needs to incorporate rules describing the system behavior following a trigger.

Such rules can be obtained in various ways:

Related topic


Updated on 13 Mar 2017.