A review on effective alarm management systems for industrial process control: Barriers and opportunities

The effective robust management of plant requires the implementation of industrial alarm systems in a very significant capacity. The core objective of alarms is to warn the operator of critical operational deviations and these operational anomalies can sometimes result in operators receiving significantly more alarms in a short period of time than they can manage, which is known as alarm flooding. In the case of any system malfunction, the alarms triggering and operators performance measure together important levels of security. Over the course of the last few decades, there has been a significant acceleration in the development of industrial automation technology, which has resulted in an increase in the total number of process sensors deployed within a specific plant. Moreover, the extensive integration of automation and security-based sensors has increased the system’s complexity and introduced a variety of operational challenges in industrial facilities. Consequently, this extensive integration has led to ineffectual system reliability, which further raised operator load volume and increased the chances of fatal conditions in certain situations. This review paper addresses the history of alarm management including major incidents that occurred in the last five decades, the development of the life cycle of alarm management, standards, and principles adopted for alarm management, techniques and methodologies developed for managing alarms, and current challenges that arise from modern control system integration.