Preprint, 11th IFAC Symposium on Dynamics and Control of Process Systems,

including Biosystems
June 6-8, 2016. NTNU, Trondheim, Norway

Causal analysis for alarm flood reduction

Vicent Rodrigo ∗,∗∗ Moncef Chioua ∗∗ Tore Hagglund ∗
Martin Hollender ∗∗
∗
Department of Automatic Control, Lund University, SE-221 00 Lund,
Sweden (email: vicent.rodrigo.marco@gmail.com, tore@control.lth.se).
∗∗
ABB Corporate Research Germany, Wallstadter Strasse 59 (email:
moncef.chioua@de.abb.com, martin.hollender@de.abb.com)

Abstract: The introduction of distributed control systems and the high level of interconnectiv-
ity of modern process plants has caused alarm flooding to become one of the main problems in
alarm management of process plants. A reduction of alarm flood periods contributes to a decrease
in plant incidents. In this work, a combination of alarm log, process data and connectivity
analysis is used to isolate consequence alarms originating from the same process abnormality
and to provide a causal alarm suggestion. The effectiveness of the method is illustrated on an
industrial case study of an ethylene plant, a typical example of a large-scale industrial system.

Keywords: alarm systems, fault detection and diagnosis, root-cause, plant-wide disturbance,
plant connectivity, approximate sequence matching, large-scale systems.

1. INTRODUCTION propagates through the plant, these methods are unable to

Alarm systems are crucial elements in the operation of
process plants as they continuously monitor the process
and inform the operators if an undesired process state that
requires their assessment or action is reached (IEC-62682,
2014).
The introduction of distributed control systems in the
process industry has increased the number of alarms per
operator exponentially (Hollifield and Habibi, 2011). Ad-
ditionally, nowadays, modern process plants present a high
level of interconnectivity due to steam recirculation, heat
integration and use of complex control systems. A dis-
turbance affecting the process plant can therefore spread
through its material, energy and information connections
and affect all the process variables on the path. Alarms
associated to these process variables are triggered and may
overload the control room operators who will not be able
to properly investigate each of these alarms (Wang et al.,
2015). This undesired situation known as alarm flood
has been recognized as a major cause of most industrial
incidents investigated by the US Chemical Safety Board
(Beebe et al., 2007). The ANSI/ISA-18.2 (2009) defines
an alarm flood as the occurrence of more than 10 alarms
per 10 minutes and per operator. In such situation, the
operators might not be able to keep the process plant
within safe operation endangering human lives and the
environment (Bransby and Jenkinson, 1998).
Henningsen and Kemmerer (1995) pointed out that in a
typical alarm log, a significant part of nuisance alarms
fall in the following categories: repetitive alarms, standing
alarms and consequence alarms. For removing repetitive
and standing alarms methods such as the use of filter-
ing, time-delay, dead-band and difference functions are
proposed. These techniques succeed in lowering the num-
ber of alarms when the process is running under nomi-
nal conditions. Nevertheless if an abnormality occurs and
suppress consequence alarms and to provide a proper di-
agnosis. This task demands to identify all causal relations
between alarms (Hollender and Beuthel, 2007).
Recently, several contributions from academia and indus-
try proposed systematic methods for the grouping of con-
sequence alarms. Event correlation is applied in Higuchi
et al. (2009) and Yang et al. (2012) for this purpose.
On the other hand, noticing that a large portion of the
alarms occurring in an alarm flood are related to each
other and follow a specific pattern, Kabir et al. (2013)
and Cheng et al. (2013) suggest using sequence pattern
matching for grouping consequence alarms. Kabir et al.
(2013) presented a method in which the similarity between
alarm flood sequences is determined under the assump-
tion that alarms occur in a consequential manner. This
assumption, may however not always be true as the or-
der of occurrence of alarms is highly dependent on their
limit setting. Postulating that the exact order of alarm
occurrences is not as important as their proximity in time,
Cheng et al. (2013) proposed an alternative method for
pattern matching of alarm flood sequences based on the
Smith-Waterman algorithm. Time stamps of the alarms
present in the alarm flood sequence are used to blur the
order of the alarm sequence when the alarm time stamps
are considered close to each other. Lai and Chen (2015)
proposed an extension of this algorithm to the case of
aligning multiple alarm flood sequences.
In Schleburg et al. (2013), the authors suggest a method
to group consequence alarms based on both a topology
model describing the process connectivity and a set of rules
built using process knowledge. In this method, every pair
of alarms is checked against the set of rules and the plant
connectivity to evaluate if two alarms are related.
While grouping related alarms has a clear benefit in
assisting the operators reacting to an alarm flood episode,

Copyright © 2016 IFAC 723

IFAC DYCOPS-CAB, 2016
June 6-8, 2016. NTNU, Trondheim, Norway
pointing them to the causal alarm (i.e. the alarm related
to the root-cause of the alarm flood) could significantly
reduce their reaction time.
Causal root-cause analysis for process troubleshooting is
the topic of several recent contributions investigating the
design of systematic methods for abnormality propagation
paths determination and plant-wide disturbances causal
analysis. Quantitative data-driven methods detecting di-
rectionality between measurements have emerged, such as
time delay analysis (Fan and Deyun, 2012) or transfer
entropy, which is used to identify the causality between
measurements even in absence of observable time delays
between them (Bauer et al., 2007). A combination of quan-
titative process history methods and qualitative models
like Signed direct graphs (SDG) (Fan and Deyun, 2012)
are proposed in Thambirajah et al. (2009).
The present work follows the line of thought in Schleburg
et al. (2013) but aims at developing a systematic method
for the isolation of the causal alarm in an alarm flood. The
proposed approach relies on the use of multiple process
information sources: alarm logs, historical process data
and a topology model of the process. Even though the
data originating from different information sources differ
in their nature, they are related to each other.
By combining alarm log, process data and conectivity
analysis not only related alarms of an alarm flood can be
grouped, but also their causal alarm can be identified.
2. CAUSAL ANALYSIS FOR ALARM FLOOD
REDUCTION
This section describes an approach for alarm flood reduc-
tion and causal alarm determination.
The proposed approach relies on two assumptions:
(1) Alarm floods are the result of an abnormality prop-
agating in the process through material, energy and
information connections.
(2) If two alarm flood sequences are similar, then they
stem from the same process abnormality.
Regarding the first hypothesis, the aim of this work is
to reduce alarm floods caused by a disturbance spreading
through the plant due to its high level of interconnectivity.
As for the second hypothesis, if two alarm flood sequences
share a common pattern and if a large portion of the alarm
occurrences in the alarm floods are present in this pattern,
it is very likely that they originate from the same process
abnormality.
The method consists of five steps. In the first step, chatter-
ing alarms are removed from the alarm log. In the second
step, time intervals containing alam floods are identified
and alarm flood sequences are built. Similar alarm flood
sequences are clustered in the third step. In the fourth
step, the signals and assets associated with the analyzed
alarms are identified. In the last step, process data causal
analysis followed by connectivity validation are performed
in order to suggest a causal alarm. The method’s general
workflow is depicted in Fig. 1.
In the present work it is assumed that an alarm sequence
is defined as follows:
724
Alarm log
Remove cha=ering
alarms
Alarm log without
cha=ering alarms
Iden7fy alarm flood
periods
Alarm flood sequences
Cluster alarm flood
sequences Alarm flood sequences
clustered and an
abnormality template
for each cluster
Map alarms to
Topology data Process data
signals and assets
Abnormality
templates and alarm,
signal and assets
iden7fiers mapped
Isolate the causal
alarm
Abnormality templates and
corresponding causal
alarms
Fig. 1. Method’s workflow
A = [a1 , a2 , ..., aM ]
am = (em , tm ), m = 1, 2, ..., M and em ∈ Σ
where em is the alarm type, particularly a tag contained
in the alphabet of alarm types Σ, and tm its time stamp.
2.1 Remove chattering alarms
Chattering alarms are defined by the industrial standard
ANSI/ISA-18.2 (2009) as “alarms that repeatedly tran-
sition between the alarm state and the normal state in
a short period of time”. Since the present work focuses
on analyzing consequence alarms, chattering alarms are
removed prior to the causal analysis.
Following Kabir et al. (2013), in order to remove chattering
alarms, a minimal admissible time interval length is chosen
and if the time elapsed between the occurrences of two
alarms of the same type is lower than the chosen interval,
the second alarm is removed. The minimal admissible time
interval length in the present work is taken as 10 min,
based on the definition of alarm flood.
2.2 Identify alarm flood periods
This step isolates time periods where alarm floods occur
and builds the corresponding alarm flood sequences.
The alarm log is divided into time intervals of 10 min.
Intervals with more alarm occurrences than a specified
threshold are highlighted. The threshold (τ ) is chosen
based on the definition of an alarm flood, i.e. more than
10 alarms per 10 min and per operator.
Duration of alarm floods in process plants ranges from a
few minutes to several hours. In order to identify an alarm
flood regardless of its duration, consecutive intervals with
more alarm occurrences than the specified threshold are
merged. Since the alarm log is discretized, it might happen
IFAC DYCOPS-CAB, 2016
June 6-8, 2016. NTNU, Trondheim, Norway
that the beginning or the end of an alarm flood sequence is
cut out, in order not to lose part of the sequence, the time
intervals before and after the consecutive time intervals
containing more than τ alarms are also included.
2.3 Cluster alarm flood sequences
Once the alarm flood time intervals are isolated and
the alarm flood sequences are built, similar alarm flood
sequences are clustered using sequence pattern matching.
Alarm time stamps are taken into account as the proximity
in time of the alarms is more important than the exact or-
der of occurrence. We use the method described in Cheng
et al. (2013) based on a modified Smith-Waterman (MSW)
algorithm to blur the order of the alarms in the sequence
when they occur closely in time. A similarity matrix is
built using pairwise similarity indices obtained from the
MSW algorithm. Finally, agglomerative hierarchical clus-
tering (AHC) with the average linkage criterion is applied
to cluster the alarm flood sequences.
One main disadvantage of the MSW algorithm is its
heavy computational burden. In order to overcome this
problem a prefiltering stage is added. A less precise but
less time consuming method is used (Kabir et al., 2013).
Combinations of alarm sequences with low similarity are
filtered out and the MSW index computation is applied to
a subset of alarm sequence combinations with a significant
similarity. A pair of alarm sequences is considered similar
if the two alarm sequences have a high ratio of alarms
in common. If two alarm sequences have few alarms in
common, the computation of the MSW similarity index is
discarded. A zero similarity index will be assumed.
Two thresholds are used: the prefilter threshold (λpref )
and the clustering threshold (λclus ). The first threshold
decides whether a pair of alarm sequences is filtered out.
The second threshold sets the stopping criteria of the
clustering algorithm. The values of these two thresholds
are interrelated: for a given clustering threshold, setting
the prefilter threshold too high can lead to combinations of
alarm sequences with MSW similarity index large enough
for being clustered, but with a prefilter similarity index
too low to pass the prefilter. A solution to facilitate the
thresholds’ choice is to make the prefilter and the MSW
similarity indices comparable. If one could insure that
SIpref ilter ≥ SIM SW , for a given clustering threshold if
the prefilter threshold is set to be equal or smaller than the
clustering threshold, all pairs of alarms that have a MSW
similarity index high enough to be clustered together will
pass the prefilter.
Given two alarm sequences A and B, a similarity index
that meet this requirement is:
|A ∩ B|
SIpref ilter (A, B) = (1)
max(|A|, |B|)
The numerator represents the number of common alarm
occurrences in both sequences. And the denominator is the
number of alarm occurrences of the longest sequence (the
similarity index is normalized between 0 and 1).
According to assumption (2) in Section 2, sequences be-
longing to the same cluster stem from the same process
725
abnormality. Therefore, an alarm template can be built
for each cluster/process abnormality. This alarm template
contains the representative alarms that identify the corre-
sponding process abnormality (Bouchair et al., 2013), see
Fig. 1. Alarms that are not related to a process abnormal-
ity can trigger during the same time interval. Obviously,
these alarms should not be included in the abnormality
template. Filtering out these alarms is achieved based on
their frequency of occurrence in the training set of alarm
floods. The threshold on frequency of occurrence is set to
50%, i.e. an alarm is kept only if it occurs in more than
50% of the sequences belonging to a given cluster.
Similarity
Clustering
Pre-filter and create
indices
templates
Set of alarm flood Reduced set of Similarity indices Alarm flood sequences
sequences combinations of alarm clustered and a fault
flood sequences template for each cluster
Fig. 2. Clustering alarm flood sequences step
The third step of the proposed method where alarm flood
sequences are clustered and a set of templates defining
the process abnormalities of all clusters is generated is
summarized in Fig. 2 and described in Alg. 1.
Alg. 1: Cluster alarm flood sequences
input : Alarm flood sequences {Ai } : i = 1, 2, ..., N
output: Clusters {Ck } : k = 1, 2, ..., K Ck = {Ai : i ∈ 1, 2, ..., N } and
fault templates {Tk } : k = 1, 2, ..., K Tk = {e : e ∈ Σ}
1 For each pair {Ai , Aj } : i 6= j and i, j = 1, 2, ..., N
if(SIpref (Ai , Aj ) ≥ λpref ) add to list LM SW
2 Build an N × N similarity matrix S
n
SIM SW (Ai , Aj ), if {Ai , Aj } ∈ LM SW
si,j =
0, otherwise
3 {Ck } = AHC(S, λclus )
4 For each Ck if (alarm type e ∈ Σ is present in more than 50% of
Ai ∈ Ck ) add e to Tk
2.4 Map alarms to signals and assets
The absence of a common naming convention for alarm,
signal and assets tags hinders a straightforward mapping
between the different process information sources. We
propose to map alarms, signals and assets based on the
similarity of the symbols contained in their tag names.
For instance, the tag name of a temperature controller
from the case study is TC11 in the P&ID, this controller
has a signal associated whose tag is TC11CO.XAY and
an alarm type TC11CO is assigned to this signal.
In this work six hashmaps {M apx→y : x 6= y, x, y =
e, si, as} mapping alarm types (e), signals (si) and assets
(as) are generated based on the computation of a similarity
index as described in Alg. 2. Particularly, the similarity
index (SISW ) obtained from the original Smith Waterman
algorithm (Smith and Waterman, 1981).
Alg. 2: Mapping signals and alarms
input : Sets of all signal tags Si={sitag } and all alarm types Σ
output: M apsi→e and M ape→si
1 For each sitag , find emap : emap ∈ Σ, SISW (sitag , emap ) =
max({SI(sitag , e)}) e ∈ Σ, SISW (sitag , emap ) ≥ λmap
2 Add pair [sitag , emap ] to M apsi→e and [emap , sitag ] to M ape→si
IFAC DYCOPS-CAB, 2016
June 6-8, 2016. NTNU, Trondheim, Norway
Fig. 3. P&ID of the cracking and quenching section of the ethylene plant
2.5 Isolate the causal alarm
The first alarm with respect to the time of occurrence
cannot be considered as the causal alarm since the time
at which an alarm triggers is highly dependent on the set-
tings of the alarm limits. Moreover, the time between the
occurrence of a process abnormality and the corresponding
alarm triggering is probabilistic. As the causal relation-
ships between signals can be captured, the process data
associated to these alarms should be analyzed instead.
The method used for this purpose is transfer entropy
(Bauer et al., 2007). Transfer entropy uses transition prob-
abilities to estimate the amount of information transferred
from one signal x to another signal y and reads:
X p(xi+h |yi , xi )
t(x|y) = p(xi+h , yi , xi ) · log
p(xi+h |xi )
The causality is obtained by comparing the amount of
information transferred from signal x to signal y with the
amount information transferred from signal y to signal x.
If tx→y is positive, more information is transferred from x
to y, and therefore x caused y. If tx→y is negative, y caused
x. If it has a value close to 0, then the causality cannot be
deduced.
tx→y = t(y|x) − t(x|y) (3)
This method may give rise to spurious results (Bauer
et al., 2007). In order to reduce their number, the ob-
tained results are validated against the plant connectiv-
ity information contained in the topology model of the
plant (Thambirajah et al., 2009). CAEX (Computer Aided
Engineering eXchange) is a vendor independent object-
oriented data exchange format based on the XML schema
that has been used in the past years for structuring plant
topology models in a flexible and expandable way (see e.g.:
Schleburg et al., 2013).
The topology based validation of the data-driven analysis
starts with the identification of the assets corresponding
to the alarms in the fault template. The connectivity of
the plant is explored using a graph-search algorithm on
a graph capturing the connections between assets in the
plant. The depth first search algorithm is employed in
this work (Yang et al., 2010). The assets suggested as
root-causes from the data-driven analysis are taken as
starting points of the disturbance propagation path while
the remaining assets are taken as secondary disturbed
elements. All feasible propagation paths between the sug-
gested root-cause and each of the secondary disturbed
assets are explored. If no feasible path is found, the root-
cause hypothesis is discarded.
Once the spurious results of the data-driven analysis have
been filtered out and one of the root-cause suggestions has
been validated with plant connectivity, the causal alarm is
taken as the alarm associated to the root-cause asset (see
(2) Alg. 3).
Alg. 3: Isolate the causal alarm
input : Clusters {Ck } and fault templates {Tk }
output: A causal alarm akc for each fautl template Tk
1 For each cluster Ck , choose a sequence Ai : Ai ∈ Ck
2 {sip } = M ape→si ({ep : ep ∈ Tk })
3 Perform process-data causal analysis on signals {sip } to obtain
suggested root-cause signals {siksg } : q ∈ N
4 {ask k k
sg } = M apsi→as ({sisg,q }) and {assd } = M ape→as ({ep })
5 If ( ∃ask k
sg,q with feasible propagation paths to all assd )
ak k
c = M apas→e (assg,q )
3. INDUSTRIAL CASE STUDY
The proposed method determining the causal alarm in
alarm flood sequence is illustrated by an analysis con-
ducted on the cracking and quenching section of an ethy-
lene plant located in Austria.
The alarm management system of the plant has more than
3800 alarms configured in the monitoring system. The
analysis is performed using eight months of collected alarm
data, during which more than 48000 alarms occurred. The
process data is presented in an excel file with a one-second
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IFAC DYCOPS-CAB, 2016
June 6-8, 2016. NTNU, Trondheim, Norway

sampling period data set. A CAEX file containing the

topology model of the plant is used. The P&ID of the plant
section is shown in Fig. 3. The data are analyzed using
a developed prototype software tool that guides the user
through the steps of the proposed method. The parameters
for the alarm analysis are set by the user. The threshold
number of alarms (τ ) (see Section 2.2) is set to a value
of six. Since operators of the ethylene plant control more
than one area, the threshold number of alarms is set to
a value smaller than 10 alarms per 10 min. Additionally,
the value of 0.4 is chosen for the clustering threshold as
well as for the prefiltering threshold (see Subsection 2.3).
The parameter σ 2 from the MSW algorithm (Cheng et al.,
2013) is set to 5000, allowing alarms with a time delay of
around 3.5min to be matched.

Fig. 5. Alarms (red) from the abnormality template of

Cluster 1 mapped to their corresponding signals
(blue) and assets (green)

Fig. 4. Clustering results: (a) Clusters (b) Abnormality

template of Cluster1

After loading the alarm log to the software tool and per-
forming the steps Remove chattering alarms and Identify
alarm flood periods, 23 alarm flood periods are identified. Fig. 6. Time trends of the signals included in the analysis
Results obtained from the Cluster alarm flood sequences
step are depicted in Fig. 4 (a). Three clusters are obtained.
From the 23 alarm sequences analyzed, four do not belong
to any cluster and 19 are clustered under one of the three
groups. Each one of these clusters containing similar alarm
flood sequences represents a different process abnormality.
Only the process abnormality from Cluster1 is further
analyzed. The template of this abnormality is displayed
in Fig. 4 (b).
To perform the data-driven and connectivity analysis, the
signals and assets associated to the alarms included in the
template are identified. After loading the process data and
the topology model of the plant, the automatic mapping
using the Smith-Waterman algorithm is performed. The
results are displayed in Fig. 5. Tags in red represent alarms, Fig. 7. Transfer entropy values tx→y
tags in blue signals and tags in green assets. For instance,
the valve G02 has an associated signal G02.Y and two suggests that the root-cause is the signal PC11.XAY.
alarms G02/010 and G02/011. GI01.Y, PC12.XAY, PI15.Y, PI14.Y, PI13.Y, PI16.Y and
GI02.Y are considered secondary disturbed signals (see
The process signals appearing in the mapping tree of Fig. 5 Fig. 7).
are considered for the analysis. These signals are displayed
in Fig. 6. The results of the process-data analysis are Finally, the result of the process-data analysis is validated
shown in a bubble chart representing the transfer entropy using the process connectivity. The process connectivity
based causality matrix (Bauer et al., 2007). The analysis analysis found feasible propagation paths starting from

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June 6-8, 2016. NTNU, Trondheim, Norway
Fig. 8. Propagation paths found by the connectivity anal-
ysis
the suggested root-cause to all secondary disturbed points.
Fig. 8 depicts the obtained propagation paths. The process
connectivity analysis suggests that the abnormality spread
from the pressure controller PC11 S to the valves G01
and G02 via the information connection between this
controller and the valves. From valve G01, the disturbance
spread to the pressure controller PC12 S. Simultaneously,
the disturbance reached Cracking Zone A, Cracking Zone
B, Cracking Zone C and Cracking Zone D via the heat
exchangers LQE 1, LQE 2, LQE 3 and LQE 4. Sensors
PI13 S, PI14 S, PI15 S and PI16 S were also affected
by the propagating disturbance since they are located
in the coils of the different cracking zones. The root-
cause suggestion from the data-driven analysis is therefore
validated by the plant connectivity analysis. An alarm
associated to PC11 S is the given causal alarm suggestion,
i.e. alarm PC11 CO 4. All the alarms in the template will
be grouped under it.
After discussion with site engineers the obtained results
were confirmed. The analysed abnormal situation corre-
sponds to a shift in the operating mode between cracking-
decoking. The transition between these two operating
modes triggers a characteristic alarm flood sequence. The
site crew mentioned that pressure controller PC11 is per-
forming the opening and closing of both valve G01 and
valve G02 during the change of operation mode and is
therefore the origin of the alarm flood.
4. CONCLUSIONS
This paper proposed an innovative way to reduce alarm
flooding by using a combination of data from different
information sources. Combining alarm log, historical pro-
cess data and process connectivity analysis allowed to not
only group consequence alarms, but also to determine
the causal alarm of an alarm flood sequence. The pro-
posed method was tested on actual data collected from
an ethylene plant. The proposed approach was able to
group related alarms triggered during an alarm flood and
to identify their causal alarm.
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