Adaptive Design of Uni-Variate Alarm Systems Based on Statistical Distance Measures

Alarm systems are utilized in the process industries to notify operators of abnormal process conditions or equipment faults. The alarm system must be appropriately constructed to maximize the possibility of safe and efficient operation. With the advancement of industrial and information technologies, real-time monitoring has shown to be an efficient method of ensuring operational safety and efficiency. Although the performance of alarm systems is an essential part of distributed control systems and has improved over the last decade, adaptive design of uni-variate alarm systems received remarkably little attention in research. We propose an adaptive designing method to evaluate and enhance the performance of an alarm system at runtime in this research. The approach is shown a flowchart, which enables adaptive design of alarm system based on the statistical characteristics of the process variable by considering both the performance deterioration of the alarm system itself, and the distributional shift of the process variable. As a result, the real-time adjustment of alarm system design parameters would be achievable, and at the same time the alarm system will operate more efficient. The proposed method is validated using a simulated example.