Risk based alarm design: A systems approach

A systems approach to design, analyze and prioritize alarms is proposed. By a system, we refer to a set of variables within a process. An alarm is activated based on the risk associated with the state of the variables in a system. The objectives are to integrate risk estimation with alarm design and to reduce the number of alarms by assigning them to sets of variables instead of single ones. Also based on the relationships among the variables in a system, the future risk associated with the present state of the variables is evaluated. Thus the proposed method has a predictive capability that allows more time to take corrective actions. The applicability of the proposed procedure is demonstrated using the example of a tank process.