Industrial Plant Alarm Prioritization for Operational State Detection
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Solution Overview
Problem
Industrial plants face challenges in determining the operational state and identifying critical corrective actions due to the overwhelming number of alarms generated, with salient information often buried in noise, making it difficult for operators to pinpoint and address issues effectively.
Innovation Solution
A computer-implemented method that filters alarms by identifying cause-effect relationships and state-dependent conditions to prioritize service alarms over process alarms, moving less critical process alarms to a secondary pool of informative alarms, allowing operators to focus on immediate corrective actions that prevent service disruptions.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of information
If all alarms are monitored and displayed to operators, then complete information about plant status is available, but the information becomes buried in noise making it difficult to identify critical issues
Solution Approach 1:
The alarm pool is segmented into two distinct pools: a first pool for service alarms (critical) and a second pool for process alarms (less critical). This segmentation allows operators to focus on critical service alarms that require immediate attention while process alarms are monitored separately, reducing information overload and improving ease of operation without losing important information.
Solution Approach 2:
Critical service alarms are extracted from the general alarm pool and placed in a separate first pool for prioritized display and handling. This extraction ensures that the most important information is not buried in noise but is prominently presented to operators, improving both information quality and ease of operation.
2Reliability
If operators respond to all alarms equally, then all potential issues are addressed, but critical service disruptions may occur due to delayed response to high-priority alarms
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary classification of alarms into service and process categories before presenting them to operators. By pre-identifying and prioritizing service alarms in a separate pool, the system ensures that critical issues requiring immediate response are presented first, reducing response time for high-priority alarms while maintaining comprehensive monitoring for process alarms.
Solution Approach 2:
The system provides structured feedback to operators by displaying service alarms with higher priority indicators and presenting them in a dedicated pool. This feedback mechanism guides operators' attention to critical issues first, ensuring that process continuity is maintained through timely response to service disruptions while still allowing monitoring of process alarms.
3Productivity
If service alarms are prioritized over process alarms, then critical operational issues are addressed first, but comprehensive monitoring of all plant variables may be reduced
Solution Approach 1:
The monitoring system is segmented into two parallel channels: service alarm monitoring and process alarm monitoring. Service alarms are handled with higher priority in a first pool to improve operational efficiency, while process alarms are continuously monitored in a second pool to maintain comprehensive monitoring coverage. Both pools are actively managed, ensuring neither type of alarm is neglected.
Solution Approach 2:
The system applies partial action by focusing immediate operator attention on service alarms that have direct impact on process continuity, while maintaining excessive monitoring coverage of process alarms in the background. This allows prioritized handling of critical issues without reducing overall monitoring coverage, as process alarms remain detected and recorded even if with lower display priority.
Data Source
AI summary
A computer-implemented method for determining an operational state of an industrial plant includes acquiring alarms raised within the plant and adding them to a pool of important alarms, determining whether a physical state of the plant indicated by a first alarm causes a second alarm or meets a predetermined state-dependent condition and, if so, moving the first alarm to a pool of informative alarms; and determining the operational state of the plant and/or a corrective action for improving this operational state based on the alarms in the pool of important alarms.