ALAP: Alarm Prioritization System for Oil Refinery

Alarm management is a fast-growing and important aspect in the oil refining process industries. While an alarm system functions as a tool to improve performance and monitor safety in a refinery plant, the alarm priority is used to convey the degree of seriousness of a specific alarm to operators. In this paper, we present a system prototype known as Alarm Prioritization (ALAP), which is developed using fuzzy logic, for Crude Distillation Unit (CDU) in an oil refinery. The objective of the paper is to prioritize the alarms during alarm floods which would ease the burden of operators with meaningless or false alarms. The ALAP prototype, which applies Mamdani inference engine, produces category and priority of the alarms that occur in the plant. The preliminary results have shown that the ALAP system helps the operators in deciding which critical alarms should be attended first rather than handling false or less priority alarms during the alarm floods.