Intelligent alarm handling and analysis

Real-time intelligent systems are being increasingly used by industry in alarm handling and analysis applications. Conventional automation technology is placing increasing demands on plant operators. This includes an ever widening range of tasks they must perform on large and complex processes, where root cause alarms can give rise to several hundreds of associated alarms within minutes or even seconds. This alarm flooding problem is not new, but some of the techniques now available to address it are. This paper provides some background on a new techniques called computer aided knowledge engineering (CAKE) and a case study on a smart alarm analysis application that contributed to the development of the CAKE tool-set