Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

This strategic project application is to develop, evaluate, and apply an advanced technology for more efficient operation and management of industrial alarm systems. Industrial accidents often have devastating consequences; moreover, they cost billions of dollars annually in production loss due to unplanned shutdowns, equipment damages, and performance degradations. To meet the desired measures of safety, quality, and efficiency, thousands of variables are constantly monitored in a typical modern industrial plant so that faults and abnormal situations can be promptly detected and appropriate remedies be applied. Detection of a fault usually results in an alarm being raised to inform an operator about the unexpected situation. It takes an operator about 10 minutes on average to process and respond appropriately to an alarm. Therefore, industry standards suggest that an operator should not receive more than six alarms per hour during the normal operation. This is, however, rarely the case in practice as the number of alarms each operator receives is far more than the standard. A majority of these alarms are false and nuisance alarms that only distract the operator from the operation of the plant and can also mask important alarms. There exist strong industrial needs and economic benefits for better interpreting and managing the alarms, and redesigning the alarm systems to reduce false and nuisance alarms, and increase the alarm accuracy. This proposal outlines a new research area for complex alarm systems based on digital signal processing and statistic analysis, with research topics ranging from alarm performance measures, alarm signal processing, multivariate alarm analysis and design, automated alarm rationalization, to industrial applications. The tools to be developed have the potential for improving safety in operation and therefore reducing the maintenance costs for the participating partners, as well as various Canadian industrial sectors in general.