An online method to remove chattering and repeating alarms based on alarm durations and intervals

•Two new rules are formulated to detect chattering and repeating alarms.•Alarm durations and intervals are exploited in the detection of chattering and repeating alarms.•An online method is proposed to detect the chattering and repeating alarms and to reduce the number of these nuisance alarms.•The m-sample delay timer is used to reduce the number of chattering and repeating alarms.•Industrial examples are provided to support the formulated rules and to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Chattering and repeating alarms, which repeatedly make transitions between alarm and non-alarm states without operators’ response, are the most common form of nuisance alarms encountered in industrial plants. The paper formulates two novel rules to detect chattering alarms caused by random noise and repeating alarms by regular patterns such as oscillation, and proposes an online method to effectively remove chattering and repeating alarms via the m-sample delay timer. Industrial examples are provided to support the formulated rules and to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.