A Survey on Alarm Management for Industrial Processes

As the first protective layer of modern industrial processes, the alarm system plays a decisive role in ensuring safety, reliability and efficient production of the process. However, most of the current industrial alarm systems are suffering from the common issue "alarm flood", which seriously affects the required function of the alarm system. In this paper, according to the characteristics of industrial processes and alarm management life cycle, five main reasons leading to "alarm flood" are summarized; the state of the art of key technologies, systematic frameworks, specifications, software packages and application status about alarm management are reviewed in terms of alarm modeling and root-cause analysis, alarm limit design, alarm prioritization, alarm type identification and processing, and alarm system performance assessment. Finally, problems and new challenges in the field of alarm management are discussed.