A Review of Alarm Root Cause Analysis in Process Industries: Common Methods, Recent Research Status and Challenges

In modern industrial plants with a variety of interconnected devices and control loops, a fault may propagate through the information and material flow pathways. Alarms are in-dicators of process disturbances that notify operators of abnormal conditions. Integration of alarm systems with advanced computerized monitoring systems has facilitated the alarm configuration in large-scale plants. Thus, fault propagation leads to many alarm annun-ciations in control rooms, which could distract operators from root causes of abnormal situations and create safety concerns. As a result, alarm root cause analysis has become an increasingly important topic of research investigated by many researchers. This paper presents an overview of alarm root cause analysis methods in process industries to serve as a guideline for researchers. It gives a tutorial review including the theoretical concepts of some widely used strategies along with a literature review of the existing methodologies by focusing on the state-of-the-art data-based approaches.(c) 2022 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.