Enhancing Alarm Prioritization in the Alarm Management Lifecycle

Despite significant improvements being made in control and safety systems, near-miss incidents and adverse accidents continue to occur in the industry. Indeed, humans have a vital role in process control success or failure due to their responses to abnormal situations and alarms. A broad study on the alarm system performance shows that good rationalization and accurate prioritization of alarms should increase the efficacy of alarm systems and improve operator decision performances. This paper discusses current gaps in alarm prioritization approaches. It then proposes a method based on Graph theory and metrics capabilities to facilitate and improve the alarm prioritization process. The method is developed based on the causal and layer of protection modeling, followed by measuring the graph metrics for prioritization purposes. Finally, the proposed method is evaluated through implementation in a simulated case study. Results show that this approach facilitates similar achievement to the alarm workshop and produces more valuable data to the cascade of abnormal situations in a structured method and shorter time.