Analytical Derivation and Comparison of Alarm Similarity Analysis Methods
An industrial process includes many devices, variables and sub-processes that are physically or electronically interconnected. These interconnections imply some level of correlation between different process variables. Since most of the alarms in a process plant are defined on process variables, alarms are also correlated. But this can be a nuisance to operators, for one fault might trigger a, sometimes large, number of alarms. So, it is important to find and correct correlated alarms. In this paper, we study different methods and techniques that were proposed to measure correlation or similarity between alarms. The similarity indices are first analytically calculated and then studied. The results are also validated using Monte Carlo simulation.
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