Effective resource utilization for Alarm Management

In industrial plants, operators constantly receive a large number of alarms that are mostly false or nuisance. A majority of these alarms are generated by a small number of process variables known as bad actors. These bad actors are either poorly controlled which result in a lot of fluctuations; or their alarms are poorly configured. There are a number of products on the market and many methods in the literature that can identify and give recommendations to resolve bad actors. Nonetheless, although rectifying bad actors will significantly drop the alarm count, it is not nearly enough. To bring the performance of an alarm system within an acceptable range (given by a number of standards), we need to go further than fixing bad actors. This second step, if not more, is as difficult and time consuming as rectifying bad actors. In this paper we discuss and present methods and ideas to improve the performance of alarm systems beyond the bad actors.