Advanced solutions for efficient alarm monitoring and management of complex industrial facilities

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This collaborative research and development project is to develop, evaluate, and apply advanced solutions and tools for assisting industrial plant operators in their decisions on abnormal situations, and therefore enhance safe plant operations. In operating industrial facilities, it is becoming increasingly important to develop plant operation strategies for sustainable Environmental, Health, and Safety (EH&S) performance and corporate social responsibility. Such EH&S targets can also lead to enormous economic benefits since abnormal situations cost billions of dollars annually in industry due to unplanned shutdowns, equipment damages, and operation failures. To ensure satisfactory operation of an industrial plant and to meet desired measures of quality, efficiency and EH&S performance, it is of paramount importance that operators be informed promptly via the alarm system of any faults and abnormal situations in the plant so that appropriate remedies can be applied. Such an operator decision support system has two main functions, fault detection and diagnosis, and alarm management and monitoring, for which there exist strong needs for advanced practical solutions. Adopting a data driven approach, based on historical process data, and alarm and event logs, this proposal outlines a number of new research areas for advanced solutions and tool development for complex industrial systems, ranging from fault detection and diagnosis, online alarm flood monitoring, operator action analysis, multivariable alarm systems, to pipeline leak detection and localization. The new results are planned to be industrially validated and implemented on facilities of participating partners. The solutions and tools to be developed have the potential for improving operations, safety, production and cost performance for the partners, as well as various Canadian industrial sectors in general.