Detection of Frequent Alarm Patterns in Industrial Alarm Floods Using Itemset Mining Methods

The presence of alarm floods is identified as the main reason for low efficiency of alarm systems and the leading cause of many industrial accidents. In practice, a commonly used technique to deal with alarm floods is dynamic alarm suppression, which temporally suppresses predefined groups of alarms following unplanned events that are not relevant or meaningful to the operator. However, determining what alarms to suppress from a pool of thousands of configured alarm variables remains a challenging problem. This paper proposes a data-driven method to find such alarm groups by detecting frequent patterns in alarm floods from historical alarm data. Main contributions of this study are: 1) the identification and extraction of alarm floods are formulated; 2) frequent alarm patterns are defined and itemset mining methods are adapted to discover meaningful patterns in alarm floods; and 3) new visualization techniques are proposed based on exiting plots to show alarm floods and alarm patterns. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by application to real industrial data.