Visualization monitoring techniques and applications in process industry alarm systems

Reasonable and effective visualization monitoring techniques and tools can help operators understand the alarm information and make timely responses. Aiming at the shortcomings and deficiencies of existing visualization techniques, such as the insufficient resources utilization, unclear alarm priority and incomplete alarm root-cause analysis, four novel visualization tools are proposed, namely information fusion based interpretative structural modelling (static and dynamic), hierarchical high density alarm plot, hierarchical priority color plot and performance level trend plot, to achieve the goals of process hierarchical model construction, alarm root-cause analysis, nuisance alarms identification, alarm prioritization and alarm system performance periodic assessment separately. As a case example, Tennessee Eastman process is utilized to show the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed visualization techniques and tools. They can not only provide the overview of original alarm information but also quickly identify the alarm root-cause, key alarms, nuisance alarms and alarm system performance level. The efficient monitoring has been realized and alarm floods has been resolved to a certain extent.