Artificial intelligence alarm management

A method of alarm rationalization in a process control system, the method comprising:

• receiving, by an advisory system processor of the process control system, industrial process information collected in real-time from the process control system;
• storing historized alarm information collected from the process control system in an advisory system database coupled to the advisory system processor;
• identifying, by the advisory system processor, one or more alarms based on the received industrial process information;
• executing, by the advisory system processor, an artificial intelligence (AI) alarm engine, wherein executing the AI alarm engine comprises:
• building a process/domain model based on the received industrial process information and the historized alarm information to evaluate the alarms in accordance with a predefined alarm philosophy;
• generating, by the process/domain model, a plurality of alarm definitions to optimize the alarms;
• and
• automatically populating a Master Alarm Database (MADB) with the alarm definitions, wherein the alarm definitions include at least one of alarm type, priority, class, limit, operator action, or consequence of inaction;
• continuously rationalizing, by the advisory system processor, the alarms based on the alarm definitions stored in the MADB, wherein continuously rationalizing comprises evaluating alarm system performance and recommending rationalization configurations with risk indicator-based audit feedback;
• providing an MADB report to determine a plurality of approved alarm definitions;
• configuring the alarms based on the approved alarm definitions;
• identifying one or more problem alarms based on a frequency of alarming;
• updating the process/domain model based on the problem alarms;
• and
• rationalizing the problem alarms.

A method of alarm rationalization in an alarm system of a process control system, the method comprising:

• defining a default alarm setting for at least one of an equipment alarm and a custom process alarm;
• defining a rationalization guide independent of a rationalization status of the alarm system;
• executing logic on a controller of the process control system to trigger an alarm in response to a predetermined condition;
• defining and creating a minimum set of alarms required to maintain normal operating limits of the process control system based on a predetermined standards-based alarm philosophy;
• historizing data collected in real-time from the process control system;
• identifying and predicting performance improvement patterns based on the historized data;
• training an artificial intelligence (AI) alarm engine based on the historized data and the rationalization guide to perform one or more of the previous steps;
• generating one or more alarm rationalization settings based on an audit of the performance improvement patterns, wherein the audit includes risk indicator-based feedback;
• automatically populating an alarm rationalization Master Alarm Database (MADB) report to feed the alarm rationalization settings to the alarm system, wherein the alarm rationalization settings include at least one of alarm type, priority, class, limit, operator action, or consequence of inaction;
• providing the MADB report to determine one or more approved alarm rationalization settings;
• configuring the alarm system based on the approved alarm rationalization settings, wherein the alarm rationalization settings are automatically configured into visualization software;
• and
• repeatedly retraining the AI alarm engine, wherein repeatedly retraining the AI alarm engine comprises feeding back performance metric data and operator-driven efficiency metrics to the MADB.