Toward the Advancement of Decision Support Tools for Industrial Facilities: Addressing Operation Metrics, Visualization Plots, and Alarm Floods

The objective of this paper is to facilitate the improvement of the control and operation of industrial facilities, by providing decision support tools. More specifically, this paper has three main contributions. First, this paper presents the definition of operation metrics that provide insight into the behavior of: 1) annunciated alarms, 2) alarm floods, and 3) operator actions in industrial facilities. Second, this paper presents visualization plots named multilayered radar plots that can present information in an elegant, dense, and comprehensive fashion. Three types of plots are proposed, which collectively compare the behavior of metrics, variables, and operation times in industrial facilities. Third, this paper presents a ranking method and a reordering design procedure of displayed alarms during an alarm flood to reorder the alarms based on the proposed alarm-flood criticality index. The purpose is to provide additional assistance to operators to focus on more critical issues. As the operation metrics, visualization plots, and the ranking in alarm floods heavily utilize historized data and given the industrial-oriented application of these decision support tools, this paper also addresses the extraction of information and the integration of the tools into industrial automation platforms. Note to Practitioners-In a control system used for an industrial facility, a large amount of data is collected and historized. The data include sensor measurements, status of actuators, alarms, and operator actions, and it therefore contains valuable information. The information can be extracted and utilized to assist in the improvement of the control and operation of the industrial facility. The objective of this paper is to provide decision support tools by: 1) defining operation metrics that can characterize the information extracted from the historized data; 2) presenting visualization plots that allow for a clear presentation and comparison of the metrics, where three types of plots are proposed for different purposes of comparison; and 3) a ranking method and a reordering design procedure of displayed alarms during an alarm flood. Furthermore, this paper discusses how the information is extracted from the historized data and how to integrate the proposed decision support tools into existing industrial automation platforms.