Control Engineering Practice 79 (2018) 50–64

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Control Engineering Practice

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/conengprac

Design of visualization plots of industrial alarm and event data for

enhanced alarm management✩
Wenkai Hu a, *, Ahmad W. Al-Dabbagh a , Tongwen Chen a , Sirish L. Shah b
a
Department of Electrical & Computer Eng., University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
b Department of Chemical & Materials Eng., University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Keywords: The availability of large volumes of alarm & event data in complex industrial facilities has prompted the
Industrial alarm systems development of alarm management techniques and also resulted in a great demand to transform such data and
Alarm management derived results into effective visual forms. Even though good visualization applications can be found in many
Alarm floods existing studies, systematic studies to the design of visualization plots are still rare in the area of industrial alarm
Alarm data
monitoring. More efforts need to be devoted to enriching the family of visualization techniques, so as to help
Visual analytics
industrial practitioners in better understanding the behavior of alarm systems and to facilitate decision making
for the enhancement of alarm management. This paper presents timely work in the design of visualization plots
of alarm & event data. First, a comprehensive literature survey is carried out to investigate existing visualization
techniques, which are categorized into three classes based on the input information. Problems in the existing
studies are summarized and design requirements for visual analytics are presented. Then, design studies on the
development of visualization plots are presented in three categories, including visualization towards overall
performance, visualization towards pattern insights, and visualization towards realtime applications. Examples
are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and utility of these visualization techniques.

1. Introduction
Alarm systems serve as critical assets to assist operators in perceiv-
ing near misses and managing hazardous situations in various large-
scale process industries, such as oil and gas, chemical, metallurgical,
pharmaceutical, and utility facilities. An efficient alarm system must:
(i) detect abnormalities and warn operators promptly, and (ii) not
mislead, overload or distract operators (Gupta, Giridhar, Venkatasub-
ramanian, & Reklaitis, 2013). A well designed alarm system with
excellent performance is critical to process safety and operational effi-
ciency. Hence, industry standards and guidelines, such as ANSI/ISA-18.2
(2009), EEMUA-191 (2013), and IEC-62682 (2014), have been widely
used by industrial practitioners, to guide the design, implementation,
and maintenance of industrial alarm systems. With the emphasis on
process safety and lessons from many industrial disasters, increasing
attention is being applied to this appealing research area, aiming at im-
proving alarm management and reducing the risk in process operation.
Real industrial alarm systems usually have poor performance owing
to alarm overloading, nuisance alarms, and alarm floods, which are
reasons that lead to distracting operators and deterioration of process
operations (Wang, Yang, Chen, & Shah, 2016). Motivated by big gaps
between the poor performance of alarm systems and requirements
(e.g., the benchmarks in industrial standards ANSI/ISA-18.2, 2009;
EEMUA-191, 2013; IEC-62682, 2014) for efficient alarm monitoring,
tremendous research efforts have been devoted to improve alarm mon-
itoring in the following aspects, including the evaluation and design of
alarm systems (Cheng, Izadi, & Chen, 2013a; Xu, Wang, Izadi, & Chen,
2012; Yu, Wang, & Yang, 2017), the detection and removal of nuisance
alarms (Hu, Wang, & Chen, 2015; Kondaveeti et al., 2013; Schleburg,
Christiansen, Thornhill, & Fay, 2013; Stauffer, Booth, & Bogdan, 2011),
the deployment of state-based alarm suppression (Hollifield & Habibi,
2010; Hu, Chen, & Shah, 2018a; Parker, 2010; Wang et al., 2016), as
well as the reduction and inhibition of alarm floods (Beebe, Ferrer,
& Logerot, 2013; Charbonnier, Bouchair, & Gayet, 2015, 2016; Hu,
Wang, & Chen, 2016; Pariyani, Seider, Oktem, & Soroush, 2010; Stanic,
Subramaniam, Sahin, Choi, & Choi, 2010; Vogel-Heuser, Schütz, &
Folmer, 2015; Wang, Ten, Hou, & Ginter, 2017). These innovative
ideas and new methods provide effective solutions to overcome alarm

✩
This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: wenkai@ualberta.ca (W. Hu), aaldabba@ualberta.ca (A.W. Al-Dabbagh), tchen@ualberta.ca (T. Chen), sirish.shah@ualberta.ca (S.L. Shah).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conengprac.2018.07.005
Received 4 April 2018; Accepted 11 July 2018
Available online 24 July 2018
0967-0661/© 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
W. Hu et al.
overloading, reduce alarm floods, and improve operator awareness to
critical events.
The extensive deployment of Distributed Control Systems (DCSs)
and the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems in
complex industrial facilities makes the acquisition, transmission, and
storage of large volumes of process operation data simple and feasible.
The availability of such data is a critical component for successful
operation of industrial processes (Kourti, 2002; Qin, 2014), and also
a driving force that has prompted the development of alarm monitoring
techniques (as discussed above). Using either traditional data statistical
methods (Gupta et al., 2013; Kondaveeti et al., 2013), or new technolo-
gies, such as data mining methods (Hu et al., 2018a; Vogel-Heuser et
al., 2015) and big data infrastructure (Li, Hu, Wang, & Huang, 2015;
Qin, 2014), a large amount of historical data can be easily mined to
extract useful knowledge and information that will help in decision-
making (Qin, 2014). For example, hidden patterns can be recovered
from historical alarm & event data, and used to design advanced alarm
management techniques (Charbonnier et al., 2015, 2016; Hu et al.,
2018a; Hu, Wang et al., 2016; Vogel-Heuser et al., 2015). Dynamic Risk
Analysis (DRA) exploits alarm data to calculate the failure probabilities
and the probabilities of a plant shut-down or accident, and uses these
results to track near misses or faults (Abimbola, Khan, & Khakzad, 2016;
Khakzad, Khan, & Amyotte, 2011; Oktem, Seider, Soroush, Pariyani, et
al., 2013; Pariyani, Seider, Oktem, & Soroush, 2012a, 2012b). However,
these results obtained using advanced data analytic methods are usually
not easily understandable, especially to process engineers and operators
who may not have the background of data science. This motivates
the need for careful investigation of the challenges associated with
knowledge representation in a more informative manner, as well as
exploring the opportunities for data visualization to assist operators of
industrial facilities in better understanding the process operation.
The concept of data visualization is to transform data into visual
representations to allow users to get a rapid understanding of insights,
observe hidden patterns, and interact with the data (Chen, Guo, & Wang,
2015; Keim, 2002; Munzner, 2015). A variety of data visualization
techniques have been proposed (Chen et al., 2015; Keim, 2002; Setlur
& Stone, 2016; Thorvaldsdóttir, Robinson, & Mesirov, 2013; Tyanova
et al., 2016; Weber, Alexa, & Muller, 2011) and applied to different
fields, such as intelligent transportation (Chen et al., 2015) and
biological analysis (Tyanova et al., 2016). However, the exploration
of data visualization in the field of alarm monitoring has not kept
pace. Kondaveeti, Izadi, Shah, Black, and Chen (2012) proposed novel
alarm data visualization tools for routine assessment of industrial alarm
systems. Laberge, Bullemer, Tolsma, and Reising (2014) and Satuf,
Kaszkurewicz, Schirru, and de Campos (2016) designed new graphical
panels to display and track alarms in real-time. However, the focus of
most relevant literature is on the devolvement of alarm management
techniques, whereas visualization plots are only used as auxiliary tools
to represent results. There is lack of systematic studies to the design
of visualization plots. Compared to the limited outcomes, the demand
for visualization of alarm & event data is huge. More efforts need to
be devoted to enriching the family of visualization techniques, so as
to help industrial practitioners in better understanding the behavior of
alarm systems and to facilitate decision making for the enhancement of
alarm management.
The goal of this paper is to guide the development of visualization
techniques for alarm & event data, and to design visualization plots
that meet industrial demands for visual analytics. First, a comprehensive
literature survey is carried out to investigate the existing visualization
techniques, which are categorized into three classes based on the
input information. Problems in the existing studies are summarized
and design requirements for visualization plots are presented. Then,
design studies on the development of visualization plots are presented in
three domains, including visualization towards overall performance, vi-
sualization towards pattern insights, and visualization towards realtime
applications. Examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness
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Control Engineering Practice 79 (2018) 50–64
and utilitarian value of these visualization techniques. Discussions on
these visualization plots are provided to guide the implementation under
different circumstances or for different objectives.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 pro-
vides a comprehensive overview of industrial alarm systems and alarm
data. Section 3 presents a literature survey on existing visualization tech-
niques for industrial alarm & event data. Section 4 presents some new
visualization plots, which have the capability of delivering informative
insights to alarm information. Concluding remarks are presented in the
last section.
2. Overview of industrial alarm monitoring
This section introduces the architecture of alarm systems in complex
industrial facilities, and also provides discussions on the structure and
properties of alarm data with supporting examples and schematics.
2.1. The basics of alarm systems
An alarm system is an integration of hardware and software that
serves as a core asset in complex industrial facilities to notify operators
of abnormal conditions or equipment malfunctions. Fig. 1 presents the
architecture of an industrial alarm system, which connects processes
and operators through four components: the data Inputs/Outputs (I/O)
server, control and safety systems, alarm logs, and Human-Machine
Interface (HMI) systems (ANSI/ISA-18.2, 2009; IEC-62682, 2014). The
control and safety systems are typically associated with two major
parts, namely, the Basic Process Control System (BPCS) and the Safety
Instrumented System (SIS), which produce alarms based on process mea-
surements or logic conditions. Further, the HMI (namely, through a com-
puter screen or an annunciator panel) presents alarms to operators in au-
dible or visual notifications, and enables operators to respond to alarms
and to make changes to processes. The alarm logs store alarms and
related events in certain structures, and perhaps in a specified format.
In order to supervise the design, implementation, and maintenance
of alarm systems, quite a few industrial standards and guidelines
have been proposed. Specifically, ANSI/ISA-18.2 (2009), EEMUA-191
(2013), and IEC-62682 (2014) are the most widely used standards. They
do not only provide benchmark specifications on the performance of
alarm systems, but also suggest exploiting advanced alarm management
techniques to improve alarm monitoring. In Fig. 1, the advanced alarm
management techniques serve to analyze the alarm & event data in
alarm logs, and extract useful knowledge from the data; such knowledge
is then utilized to supervise alarm rationalization and alarm system
design, or to directly assist operators with decision-making (for example,
while facing difficult situations, such as during critical alarms or alarm
floods). The advanced alarm management techniques can be imple-
mented in external systems, and many tools developed in the literature
can be used to implement the techniques. For example, the association
rules of mode-dependent alarms can be extracted from historical alarm
data using the method in Hu et al. (2018a) and then used as candidates
to configure state-based alarming modules, which are commonly used
to reduce standing alarms (referred to as alarms remaining in the active
state for an extended duration, according to ANSI/ISA-18.2, 2009). Also,
methods in Charbonnier et al. (2015), Charbonnier et al. (2016) and Hu,
Wang et al. (2016) provide solutions to help operators perceive alarm
floods in an early stage to prevent the deterioration of the situation.
2.2. The basics of alarm and event data
Alarm signals are produced as binary time series in alarm systems
to indicate the associated processes deviating from their normal speci-
fications or violation of some safety conditions. Whether the monitored
process is analog or digital, the mechanism to generate an alarm signal
is the same, and can be uniformly described as
{
1, if 𝑦(𝑡) ∉ 𝑌 ,
𝑥̃ 𝑎𝑖 (𝑡) = (1)
0, otherwise,
W. Hu et al.
Fig. 1. The architecture of an industrial alarm system. The arrows indicate dataflow and the dashed line indicates the off-line utilization of uncovered knowledge.
Fig. 2. An overview of messages stored in an Alarm & Event (A&E) database.
where 𝑎𝑖 represents a unique alarm variable that belongs to the whole set
of configured alarms  = {𝑎𝑖 , 𝑖 = 1, 2, … , ||} in an alarm system (The
notation |⋅| denotes the cardinality of a set). 𝑌 is the normal operating
specification of a process variable 𝑦, and it indicates an alarm limit
(e.g., a high or low limit) for an analog 𝑦, or certain logic condition
for a digital 𝑦. The occurrences of 𝑎𝑖 ∈  can be found at triggering
time instants as
{ uniquely identifies a basic element, such as a process variable, a
1, if 𝑥̃ 𝑎𝑖 (𝑡 − 1) = 0 & 𝑥̃ 𝑎𝑖 (𝑡) = 1,
𝑥𝑎𝑖 (𝑡) = (2)
0, otherwise.
When an alarm occurs, it is presented to operators in an audible
or visual form, and is displayed on a computer screen as a textual
message in a scrolling list (ANSI/ISA-18.2, 2009; EEMUA-191, 2013;
Hollifield & Habibi, 2010; IEC-62682, 2014), as an example. Then,
the operator responds to this alarm and takes corrective actions to
bring the system back to normal. There are two types of operator
responses: (i) a response involving state transitions of alarms, for exam-
ple, acknowledging, shelving/unshelving, suppressing/unsuppressing,
and disabling/enabling alarms, as shown in the alarm state transition
diagram in ANSI/ISA-18.2 (2009); (ii) a response involving operator
actions dealing with the process or equipment, for example, manipu-
lating a valve, adjusting control parameters, and changing over to a
standby pump (EEMUA-191, 2013; Hollifield & Habibi, 2010). All these
messages involving alarms and operator responses can be historized and
stored in an Alarm & Event (A&E) database. In addition to alarm mes-
sages and operator responses, events about automatic process changes,
for example, the variation of operating rates and transition of operating
modes (Hu et al., 2018a), are also available in many A&E databases.
Fig. 2 presents the categorization of events in an A&E database along
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Control Engineering Practice 79 (2018) 50–64
with some real examples for each category. It is also noteworthy that
each event is associated with many attributes to uniquely identify the
process, describe the functionality of the alarm, and denote real-time
messages.
Fig. 3 displays some commonly used data attributes in industrial
alarm systems. These attributes are important bricks constituting the
A&E database that describe the alarms. For example, a tag name
device, and a control loop, which may have various built-in alarm
functions distinguished by alarm types, such as low (LO), Low–Low (LL),
High (HI), High–High (HH), Low Deviation (LD), and High Deviation
(HD) (Arnold & Darius, 1989). Priorities, such as critical, high, medium,
and low, are essential attributes indicating the importance of alarms,
and are usually assigned based on safety, financial, and environmental
factors (Timms, 2009). In addition to these configuration attributes,
which do not usually change over time, the other data attributes, such
as alarm messages, time stamps, and event IDs, are real-time messages
indicating if an alarm occurs (ALM) or returns-to-normal (RTN), along
with the time as well as the numerical identifier information related
to the event. Arnold and Darius (1989), Timms (2009), and Hollifield
and Habibi (2010) provided more details about the data attributes in
industrial alarm systems.
Further, Table 1 presents an illustrative example of a structured A&E
database, where each column header describes an attribute and each
row corresponds to an event displayed through the textual message.
More specifically, the column ‘‘Event type’’ identifies if the event is
an alarm or an action; the column ‘‘Message’’ presents the changes in
alarm states or operator actions; the column ‘‘Description’’ describes the
functionality of each alarm or action. For example, for the process tag
W. Hu et al.
Fig. 3. An overview of data attributes associated with alarms.
Table 1
An example of a structured A&E database.
Time stamp Event type Tag name Alarm type
21/07/2017 14:21:19 Alarm LV2 HI
21/07/2017 14:26:47 Action VAV2
21/07/2017 14:27:33 Alarm LV2 HI
21/07/2017 17:55:27 Action PMP1
21/07/2017 17:56:31 Alarm PI1 LO
21/07/2017 21:17:23 Action PMP1
21/07/2017 21:18:02 Alarm PI1 LO
‘‘LV2’’ measuring the fluid level located in ‘‘Area B’’, its high limit ‘‘HI’’
alarm configured with a ‘‘Critical’’ priority was triggered at 14:21:19,
21/07/2017. Then, the operator responded by opening a drainage valve
‘‘VAV2’’ at 14:26:47. This action brought the process back to normal and
the alarm cleared at 14:27:33. It can be observed that the availability
of such detailed information stored in an A&E database, such as that of
Table 1, allows for further analysis to gain a deeper understanding on
the operation of complex industrial facilities. To facilitate such efforts,
data visualization is considered an instrumental step.
3. Taxonomy of visualization of alarm and event data
This section investigates existing visualization techniques for alarm
& event data, and categorizes them into three classes depending on
the input information, including the visualization of raw information,
visualization of statistical results, and visualization of alarm patterns. A
detailed investigation into the visualization techniques is provided in the
subsequent subsections, and Table 2 presents a list of these visualization
techniques, along with comparisons from various perspectives.
3.1. Visualization of raw information
The raw information refers to binary-valued alarm signals as well
as information contained in a historical A&E database. Visualization
of such raw information does not involve any statistical calculation or
advanced data analytics. The main objective of the visualization of raw
data is related to two aspects, namely, (i) providing an overview picture
of the performance of alarm systems for offline analysis, and (ii) tracking
the annunciation of alarms for real-time monitoring. Visualizing his-
torical data on alarms and related events could be beneficial in offline
analysis. The High Density Alarm Plot (HDAP) proposed in Kondaveeti
et al. (2012) is a useful tool that provides a holistic view of alarm system
performance by visualizing the alarm occurrences of the top-most bad
actors (referred to as alarms with highest alarm counts) as color coded
bins. Yang et al. (2012) and Wang et al. (2016) exploit another type of
high density plot that displays both the alarm occurrences and alarm
states, so that users can observe long standing alarms and alarm flood
situations. In addition, Hu et al. (2018a), Hu et al. (2015), Hu, Wang et
al. (2017) and Wang et al. (2016) visualize the time trends of historical
alarms and related events as stem plots or line plots, so as to observe or
Control Engineering Practice 79 (2018) 50–64
Message Priority Plant unit Description
ALM Critical Area B The fluid level is above its high limit
OPEN Area B Open a drainage valve at the tank outlet
RTN Critical Area B The fluid level is below its high limit
STOP Area C Stop a pump that supplies lube oil
ALM Low Area C The discharge pressure is below its low limit
START Area C Start a pump that supplies lube oil
RTN Low Area C The discharge pressure is above its low limit
validate the uncovered relations, such as correlated alarms and mode-
dependent alarms.
In real-time monitoring, alarms are displayed on physical screens in
a traditional list-based alarm summary display, for example Fig. 1 in
Laberge et al. (2014), which has the capacities to discriminate alarm
priorities by colors, provide parameter information and descriptions,
and allow operators to sort the order of the displayed list (Hollifield
& Habibi, 2010). Laberge et al. (2014) proposed a new alarm tracker
summary display, which combines the list-based display with a new
trend-style overview display in two integrated panels. Experimental
results demonstrated that operators were more responsive to alarms and
showed a better capability in handling alarm floods. In the experiments
to study human factors (Adhitya et al., 2014), a schematic display was
used in a company with the alarm display. The schematic display pro-
vides an overview of physical components. The alarm display visualizes
the alarms associated with these components using a traditional list-
based pane and a historical alarm pane, where the latter one displays
temporal trends of alarms that have occurred recently. A similar alarm
display pane was also used in Xu et al. (2014) to visualize both historical
alarms in a recent period and anticipatory alarms in the near future. In
order to improve operator situation awareness in alarm floods, Satuf et
al. (2016) proposed a new ecological alarm interface, called Advanced
System of Intelligent Alarms to display alarms prioritized in real-time
with relevant graphical information on process conditions. Overall, the
list-based alarm summary and the historical panel of alarm trends are
useful for real-time alarm monitoring.
3.2. Visualization of statistical results
In contrast to the raw information, the statistical results are not
directly available from the A&E database and usually involve certain
calculations. The basic statistical analysis derives performance metrics,
such as the alarm count, average alarm rate, and peak alarm rate, to
judge whether an alarm system experienced alarm overloading or bad
alarm flood situations. The dynamic risk analysis computes the failure
probabilities of safety systems and the probabilities of a plant shut-down
or accident, so as to evaluate risks of process operations and diagnose
faults (Oktem et al., 2013; Pariyani et al., 2012a, 2012b). Commonly
known plots, such as bar charts, pie charts, spider charts, and box plots,
are used in practice to visualize such statistical results. For example,
bar charts were employed to visualize alarm counts and alarm priority
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W. Hu et al. Control Engineering Practice 79 (2018) 50–64

Table 2
Categorization of existing visualization techniques applied to alarm & event data; the abbreviations AM, PC, and OR refer to alarm messages, process changes, and
operator responses, respectively; U and M refer to univariate and multivariate, respectively; L and S refer to large and small, respectively.
Input information Visualization plots Event Type Dimension On/off-line Data amount
AM PC OR (U/M) (L/S)
High density alarm plot (Kondaveeti et al., 2012) ✓ M Off L/S
High density plot of time trends (Wang et al., 2016; Yang, Shah, Xiao, & ✓ M Off L/S
Chen, 2012)
Raw information
Stem or line plot (Hu et al., 2018a; Hu et al., 2015; Hu, Wang, Chen, & ✓ ✓ ✓ U/M Off S
Shah, 2017; Wang et al., 2016)
List-based alarm summary display (Hollifield & Habibi, 2010; Laberge et al., ✓ M On S
2014)
Alarm tracker summary display (Laberge et al., 2014) ✓ M On S
Alarm list and trend display panes (Adhitya, Cheng, Lee, & Srinivasan, ✓ M On S
2014; Satuf et al., 2016; Xu, Adhitya, & Srinivasan, 2014)
Bar chart (Beebe et al., 2013; Hu et al., 2015; Hu, Wang et al., 2017; ✓ ✓ ✓ U/M Off S
Kondaveeti et al., 2013; Oktem et al., 2013; Pariyani et al., 2010, 2012b;
Soares, Pinto, & de Souza Jr, 2016; Wang et al., 2016; Yu, Khan, &
Garaniya, 2016)
Statistical Results
Pie chart (Timms, 2009) ✓ U Off S
Spider chart (Satuf et al., 2016) ✓ ✓ ✓ M Off S
Layered radar chart (Al-Dabbagh, Hu, Lai, Chen, & Shah, 2018) ✓ ✓ ✓ M Off S
Box plot (Charbonnier et al., 2016; Pariyani et al., 2010, 2012b) ✓ ✓ U Off S
Segmented area plot (EEMUA-191, 2013; Gao, Xu, Gu, Lin, & Zhu, 2015) ✓ M Off S
Alarm burst plot (Hollifield & Habibi, 2010; Wang et al., 2016) ✓ U On/off L/S
Bayesian network, tree diagram (Abimbola et al., 2016; Khakzad et al., ✓ ✓ ✓ M off S
2011; Pariyani et al., 2012a; Wang, Khan, & Ahmed, 2015)
Similarity color map (Charbonnier et al., 2016; Cheng, Izadi, & Chen, ✓ M Off S
Alarm patterns 2013b; Kondaveeti et al., 2012; Soares et al., 2016; Yang et al., 2012)
Workflow diagram (Gao et al., 2015; Hu, Al-Dabbagh, Chen, & Shah, 2016; ✓ ✓ ✓ M Off S
Hu, Wang et al., 2017; Simeu-Abazi, Lefebvre, & Derain, 2011)
Heat map (Charbonnier et al., 2015) ✓ M Off S

distributions (Beebe et al., 2013), time durations in alarm states (Wang
et al., 2016), time delays between alarm occurrences (Hu et al., 2015;
Hu, Wang et al., 2017), average recovery time (Pariyani et al., 2010),
run length distributions and chattering indices (Kondaveeti et al., 2013),
and the probabilities of failures or emergency shutdown (Oktem et
al., 2013; Pariyani et al., 2012b). Three-Dimensional (3D) bar charts
were utilized to display alarm counts with respect to months and
years (Soares et al., 2016), and joint probability distributions on a self-
organizing map (Yu et al., 2016). A stacked bar chart was used in
Pariyani et al. (2010) to visualize the number of alarms categorized
by priorities and types. In addition to bar charts, other plots, such
as pie charts, box charts, and spider charts, were also exploited to
display alarm priority distributions (Timms, 2009), length of alarm
sequences (Charbonnier et al., 2016), probabilities of an emergency
shutdown or an accident (Pariyani et al., 2012b), recovery time for
abnormal events (Pariyani et al., 2010), and performance metrics of
two scenarios (Satuf et al., 2016). In Al-Dabbagh et al. (2018), a layered
radar chart was proposed to track the changes of alarm counts for a large
number of alarm variables.
Based on the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) recommendations
in EEMUA-191 (2013), a segmented area plot is commonly used in
practice to determine whether the overall performance of an alarm
system is predictive, robust, stable, reactive, or overloaded (EEMUA-
191, 2013; Gao et al., 2015). An alarm burst plot is used to visualize
the burst alarm rate, which is calculated as the number of alarms in a
10 min time window (Hollifield & Habibi, 2010; Wang et al., 2016). The
dynamic analysis visualizes alarms and related events using networks
or tree diagrams, such as the Bayesian network (Khakzad et al., 2011;
Wang et al., 2015), the event tree (Pariyani et al., 2012a), and the fault
tree (Abimbola et al., 2016). In summary, each visualization plot has its
own advantage and specific usage. The bar chart is usually used to make
simple comparisons of one or multiple metrics. The pie chart is more
appropriate to display percentages of the whole. The spider chart can
be used to compare multiple metrics over different periods or between
different categories. The box plot is useful to show time information, for
example, response time and time delays. The matrix plot is a good tool
to evaluate the overall performance, and the alarm burst plot helps in
identifying alarm floods. The networks or tree diagrams can reveal the
transition probabilities between events and help to track abnormalities.
3.3. Visualization of alarm patterns
Alarm patterns refer to the results, such as correlations, similarities,
association rules, and sequential patterns, that are not directly observ-
able and require advanced data analytic methods for their extraction
from data. These alarm patterns can help industrial practitioners with
decision-making under different scenarios, such as configuring state-
based alarming, coping with alarm floods, and reducing redundant
alarm configurations. The correlations or similarities between alarms
or alarm floods can be represented by cross-correlations, Jaccard coeffi-
cients, and Sogenfrei coefficients (Hu et al., 2015; Hu, Wang et al., 2016;
Yang et al., 2012). To visualize such relations, correlation color maps
and similarity color maps were used in Charbonnier et al. (2016), Cheng
et al. (2013b), Kondaveeti et al. (2012), Soares et al. (2016) and Yang
et al. (2012). A correlation color map displays correlation levels that
range from −1 to 1, between alarms in pairs (Soares et al., 2016; Yang
et al., 2012). Each correlation level is represented using a colored block.
Analogously, a similarity color map displays similarities that range from
0 to 1, between pairwise alarms, alarm floods, or faults (Charbonnier et
al., 2016; Cheng et al., 2013b; Kondaveeti et al., 2012). By contrast,
some relations, such as causal relations between alarms (Gao et al.,
2015; Hu, Wang et al., 2017) and dependencies between events or
alarms (Hu, Al-Dabbagh et al., 2016; Simeu-Abazi et al., 2011), are
asymmetric and acyclic, and thus can only be represented using work
flow diagrams, such as signed directed graphs and Petri nets. Some
patterns, such as alarm sets or alarm sequences, are usually associated
with some specific alarm floods or faults. To show whether alarms are
present in such situations, a binary matrix plot or a heat map could be
a good choice (Charbonnier et al., 2015).
3.4. Discussions
The visualization plots in the above literature survey are useful
tools to help in observing and understanding raw A&E data, as well as

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statistical results and patterns derived from the data. Even though the Table 3
applicability and effectiveness of these plots have been demonstrated An example of performance metrics for the alarm management of five consoles.
by many numerical or industrial applications, there are still quite a few Console Peak alarm rate Average alarm rate Num. of unique alarms
common problems that arise, which are summarized in the following (alarms/10 min) (alarms/10 min)
three aspects: Console 1 6 0.5 300
Console 2 87 4.8 1273
(i) Most existing plots in literature are designed to help researchers Console 3 359 3.4 897
with better representations of the derived statistical and ana- Console 4 89 33 2534
Console 5 1496 129 1867
lytical results, other than to assist industrial practitioners, such
as alarm analysts, process engineers and plant operators, to
understand the performance of alarm systems or to improve
alarm management. (1) Bubble Chart to Evaluate Overall Performance
(ii) Most of these plots are only capable of presenting very limited in- A bubble chart is a variant of the scatter plot, but displays data in
formation, such as results based on a single attribute, and results three dimensions. It is adopted here and combined with the segmented
related to a small number of variables. They are not informative area plot (EEMUA-191, 2013; Gao et al., 2015) to evaluate the overall
enough to give a comprehensive look of the performance of performance of an alarm system. Hereby, this bubble chart consists of
an alarm system, or to help users to get a deep insight of the two essential parts:
problems hidden in the data.
(i) The segmented area plot divides the performance of alarm sys-
(iii) There is lack of comparisons to the industrial benchmarks, such
tems into 5 zones based on the KPI recommendations in EEMUA-
as the acceptable alarm rate and the threshold for alarm floods. It
191 (2013);
is important that this be done since these benchmarks represent
(ii) The bubbles are displayed in three dimensions, including the
the targets for maintaining a healthy industrial alarm system.
average alarm rate 𝛾𝑎 as the vertical coordinate, the peak alarm
In summary, the studies on the design of visualization techniques rate 𝛾𝑝 as the horizontal coordinate, and the number of unique
for industrial alarm & event data are quite limited, and more efforts alarms 𝛾𝑛 as the area of the bubble.
should be taken to enrich the family of visualization techniques, so
Based on Eq. (2), the average alarm rate 𝛾𝑎 for the data in a given
as to help industrial practitioners to have a better understanding the
time period [𝑠 , 𝑒 ] is
behavior of alarm systems and take actions to enhance industrial alarm
management. The development of visualization techniques of alarm & ∑|| ∑𝑒
𝑖=1
𝑥 (𝑘)
𝑘=𝑠 𝑎𝑖
event data should incorporate the following requirements: 𝛾𝑎 = . (3)
𝑒 − 𝑠 + 1
(i) The capability of being easily understandable to industrial prac- where 𝑠 and 𝑒 indicate the start and end time stamps of the studied
titioners, such as alarm analysts, process engineers and plant time period. The peak alarm rate refers to the largest value of the burst
operators. alarm rate 𝜈(𝑡), which is calculated as the alarm count in the past time
(ii) The capability of presenting the overall performance of an bin [𝑡 − 𝑇 + 1, 𝑡]. Based on Eq. (2), the formula of 𝜈(𝑡) is given by
alarm system from multiple perspectives and revealing hidden ||
problems in the historical data. ∑ ∑
𝑡
𝜈(𝑡) = 𝑥𝑎𝑖 (𝑘), (4)
(iii) The capability of making comparisons between groups, variables, 𝑖=1 𝑘=𝑡−𝑇 +1
time periods, as well as metrics and the corresponding bench-
where 𝑇 takes the value of 600 s based on benchmarks in ANSI/ISA-18.2
marks.
(2009). Then, the peak alarm rate is calculated as
(iv) A better design methodology to deliver effective display of the
data and catch users’ attentions immediately. 𝛾𝑝 = max 𝜈(𝑡). (5)
𝑡∈[𝑠 +𝑇 −1,𝑒 ]
Due to the availability of large volumes of historical data in modern
There are two ways to calculate the number of unique alarms 𝛾𝑛 : (i) it
industrial facilities, the demand of more and better visualization tech-
can be the number of configured alarms in an alarm system, namely,
niques is huge, so as to augment human capabilities to discover problems
𝛾𝑛 = ||, or (ii) it can be the number of unique alarms with at
and patterns from the alarm & event data. The development of new
least one occurrence within the studied period, namely, 𝛾𝑛 = |{𝑎𝑖 ∈
visualization techniques should overcome the exposed problems in the ∑𝑒
 ∶ 𝑥 (𝑡) > 0}|. Five colors are used to distinguish the five
𝑡=𝑠 𝑎𝑖
literature and incorporate the requirements in the above discussions.
performance zones. Given the average alarm rate and peak alarm rate
4. Design of visualization plots of alarm & event data as 𝛾𝑎 and 𝛾𝑝 (alarms/10 min for each operator), the coordinates (𝑥, 𝑦)
(the center of each bubble) are calculated as
This section presents the design of visualization plots that provide ( )
(𝑥, 𝑦) = min(𝑓 (𝛾𝑎 ), 4), min(𝑓 (𝛾𝑝 ), 5) , (6)
comprehensive and intuitive insights of alarm & event data. The visu-
alization techniques are demonstrated for three categories, namely, vi- where the formula 𝑓 (⋅) is given by
sualization towards overall performance, visualization towards pattern {
1 + log10 𝛾 if 𝛾 > 1,
insights, and visualization towards realtime applications. 𝑓 (𝛾) = (7)
𝛾 if 0 ≤ 𝛾 ≤ 1,
4.1. Visualization towards overall performance where 𝛾 is either 𝛾𝑎 or 𝛾𝑝 . The minimization in Eq. (6) guarantees that
the center of a bubble never exceeds the boundary of the area plot, even
The first type of visualization techniques involves evaluation of if 𝛾𝑎 > 1000 and 𝛾𝑝 > 10 000. The area 𝐴 of a bubble is proportional to
overall performance of an alarm system or a complex industrial facility, the number of unique alarms 𝛾𝑛 , i.e., 𝐴 = 𝐾𝛾𝑛 , where 𝐾 is a user defined
which can be based on performance metrics or basic statistical values. parameter to adjust the size of the bubble. It can be set to a large value,
In this subsection, three visualization plots are proposed, namely, a so as to avoid overspreading of large bubbles.
bubble chart to evaluate overall performance, a treemap to quickly Fig. 4 gives an example of the bubble chart, which displays the met-
locate problems, and a ranking chart to track top bad actors. They allow rics (shown in Table 3) calculated based on the data over one full month.
users to gain more abstract information, quickly and easily assess the Each bubble represents one console; the area of each bubble is propor-
overall performance, and make comparisons to benchmarks. tional to the number of unique alarms (shown in the last column of

55
W. Hu et al.
Fig. 4. An example of the bubble chart to evaluate the overall performance
of alarm systems. The five colors correspond to five performances: predictive,
robust, stable, reactive, and overloaded, from the best to the worst. The center
of each bubble corresponds to the average alarm rate and the peak alarm rate
of each console. The area of the bubble is proportional to the number of unique
alarms in each console. A bubble could be as small as a point, representing only
one unique alarm. To view the numeric information, an interactive design can
be included to display the three metrics as data tips by pointing to a bubble.
Table 3) in the data of each console. It can be observed from the plot that
the alarm system in Console 1 had a predictive performance, meaning
that the average alarm rate was acceptable to the operator and there was
not any alarm flood problem. By contrast, the alarm systems in Consoles
4 and 5 had extremely high alarm rates, making the alarm systems lose
their effectiveness and thus overloading operators. The alarm rates in
Consoles 2 and 3 were high but tolerable. Further efforts can be taken
to bring the alarm rates down targeting at a predictive performance.
Remark 1. This visualization plot is designed to present the overall
performance of industrial alarm systems. It is a combination of the
trendy scatter/bubble chart and the segmented area plot. Compared
to conventional scatter/bubble charts, the designed plot is capable
of comparing metrics with industrial benchmarks, making the perfor-
mance evaluation more intuitive. Compared to the segmented area plot
(EEMUA-191, 2013; Gao et al., 2015), it provides additional information
about the scale of each console or alarm system, and enables compar-
isons between different consoles or alarm systems in three dimensions.
This visualization plot can be used by managers, team leaders, alarm
analysts, and process engineers, for routine alarm audits. Targets can
be set for future alarm management based on the zone location of
each alarm system in the plot and the size of its scale. It can also be
used in realtime to track the performance change of an alarm system.
An unhealthy status, e.g., ‘‘Reactive’’ and ‘‘Overloaded’’, will lead to
interventions to improve the performance of the alarm system.
(2) Treemap to Quickly Locate Problems
A treemap is a simple visualization plot displaying data of multiple
categories in a hierarchical structure (Shneiderman, 1992). Each cate-
gory is represented by a rectangular area with its size determined by the
associated quantity value. Rectangle areas representing subcategories
are nested inside of each rectangle in the parent level. The sum of the
sizes of all child rectangles in each parent category is usually equal to the
size of their parent rectangle. Here, the treemap is adapted to visualize
statistical information, such as alarm counts. It consists of the following
essential parts:
(i) The hierarchical structure is used to show categories (e.g., plant
units, priorities, and alarm types) and items (e.g., alarm tags) in
the first and second levels of the treemap, respectively;
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Control Engineering Practice 79 (2018) 50–64
(ii) The interactive design is incorporated to allow observation from
different perspectives, to enable zooming-in on the second level
of the treemap, and to show the associated basic information
as data tips (e.g. the tag name, priority, unit, alarm count, and
chattering index);
(iii) Colors are effectively used to highlight certain groups or items,
and texts are adjusted based on sizes of rectangles.
The treemap has several advantages: it makes efficient use of the
screen space and thus can display a large number of items; it can reveal
patterns or problems based on colors and sizes of rectangles; it can easily
carry out comparisons between items or groups.
An example of the treemap displaying alarm counts categorized by
plant units is shown in Fig. 5. There are 48 categories corresponding
to 48 areas in a thermal power plant. The name of each plant unit
and the alarm count in proportion to the whole alarm count are shown
at the header of each rectangle. Top 10 bad actors are displayed with
tag names and highlighted using an orange color. It can be observed
from the plot where the most alarms were from as well as who the top
bad actors were. In addition, an interactive design is incorporated: two
dropdown menus are included to facilitate observations from different
perspectives rather than just to display top 10 bad actors. The first
dropdown menu enables grouping alarms based on different categories,
such as alarm priorities and alarm types. The second dropdown menu
allows highlighting alarms based on different criterions, e.g., the user
can choose to highlight all chattering alarms.
The second interactive design is incorporated: the treemap in the
second level is generated by clicking on the appropriate rectangle
in the first level. For example, Fig. 6 presents the second level of
the treemap in Fig. 5 by selecting the plant unit ‘‘Coal pulverizer’’.
Moreover, in order to observe detailed information, the third interactive
design is incorporated: a plot shows up to present detailed information
of one alarm tag when the mouse pointer moves over its associated
rectangle. For example, moving the mouse pointer over the rectangle of
‘‘TAG165.TP18’’, this rectangular area is highlighted by a golden frame;
meanwhile a data tip window shows up to display the basic information
of this alarm tag, including the tag name, alarm priority, plant unit,
alarm count, chattering index, and the line graph of time series, shown in
Fig. 7. The orange color is used for a ‘‘High’’ priority. The information of
chattering index is highlighted using the red color to capture attentions,
since it is higher than the threshold of chattering alarms (Kondaveeti
et al., 2013). Moving off this rectangle, this data tip window for
‘‘TAG165.TP18’’ disappears automatically. Such an interactive design is
helpful for the user to quickly observe the detailed information hidden in
the treemap. It can also be incorporated in the first level of the treemap.
Remark 2. This visualization technique is designed to observe statis-
tical results from different perspectives and quickly locate problems at
rectangular areas. Compared to bar charts and pie charts, this treemap
presents more information involving groups and individual alarms
through the hierarchical structure, and makes more efficient use of
space. Compared to conventional tables, it enables direct comparisons
based on the rectangular areas, and allows flexible grouping and high-
lighting. In addition, the interactive designs help to observe detailed
information while displaying the abstracted results. Potential users in-
clude alarm analysts and process engineers, who take the responsibility
of maintaining alarm systems and solving alarm management problems.
It can be concluded quickly from the treemap which groups (e.g., units,
priorities, and types) tend to receive more alarms and which alarms
account for a high alarm rate. As a result, the problems with these groups
and alarms will be given priorities for investigation and solution.
(3) Ranking Chart to Track Top Bad Actors
As an essential stage of the alarm management life cycle described
in ANSI/ISA-18.2 (2009), an audit provides periodic reviews of the
performance of an alarm system and may reveal gaps that are not
apparent from routine monitoring. A typical task of alarm audit is to
W. Hu et al. Control Engineering Practice 79 (2018) 50–64

Fig. 5. An example of the treemap of alarm counts categorized by plant units. The size of each rectangle (or child rectangle) corresponds to the total number of
alarm occurrences in a plant unit (or of an alarm tag). The orange color highlights the top 10 bad actors. The tag names and alarm count proportions are displayed.
The font size of each tag name is proportional to the size of its rectangle. Two dropdown menus are designed to enable grouping alarms based on different categories
and to allow highlighting items based on different criterions. Moreover, clicking on the appropriate rectangle can generate the treemap in the second level.

Fig. 6. An example of the treemap in the second layer.

track top bad actors, which are known as alarms with highest alarm (iv) Alarm counts are displayed beside the colored blocks.
counts. The top bad actors are often the most contributing factors of
Based on Eq. (2), the alarm count 𝜓𝑎𝑖 of each unique alarm variable
high alarm rate. Tracking and solving top bad actors help to relieve ∑𝑒
alarm overloading. To track the changes of top bad actors, a ranking 𝑎𝑖 is calculated as 𝜓𝑎𝑖 = 𝑘= 𝑥𝑎𝑖 (𝑘) in a studied time period of [𝑠 , 𝑒 ].
𝑠
chart is proposed. It consists of four essential components: Given alarm data over two time periods, two zones of top bad actors
are drawn based on the alarm counts. In each zone (denoted by 𝑗 = 1
(i) Two zones display the top bad actors over two time periods, and or 2), the top 𝑁 bad actors over the corresponding time period are
the bad actors in each zone are ranked in a decreasing order of found and denoted by 𝑎̂𝑗𝑖 ∈ , 𝑖 = 1, 2, … , 𝑁 with their alarm counts
∑𝑒
the alarm count; 𝜓𝑎̂𝑗 = 𝑘= 𝑥 𝑗 (𝑘). Then, the total alarm count of the top 𝑁 bad actors
𝑠 𝑎̂𝑖
𝑖 ∑
(ii) Each zone consists of a group of stacked blocks corresponding to in each zone is 𝛹 𝑗 = 𝑁 𝑗
𝑖=1 𝜓𝑎̂𝑗 . The height 𝐻 of each zone of the ranking
𝑖
different bad actors; 𝛹𝑗
chart is calculated as 𝐻 𝑗 = max(𝛹 1 ,𝛹 2 )
. Accordingly, the block height ℎ𝑗𝑖
(iii) Different colors are used to indicate disappearing, appearing, 𝜓 𝑗
𝑎̂
increasing rank, and decreasing rank of the bad actors; of each bad actor 𝑎̂𝑗𝑖 is 𝑗 𝑗
ℎ𝑖 = 𝐻 ∗ 𝛹 𝑗 . 𝑖

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Fig. 7. An example of the interactive design that displays the basic information of an alarm in a data tip window. This window appears automatically by moving
the mouse pointer over a rectangle in the treemap.

Fig. 8. An example of the ranking chart to track top bad actors. The left and right zones indicate the top 10 bad actors (denoted by 10 colored blocks) over two
months. The height of each block is proportional to the alarm count of the bad actor. Two colors are used: orange represents the appearing or increasing rank; green
indicates the disappearing or decreasing rank. The numbers on the side are alarm counts for the top 10 bad actors over the week. (For interpretation of the references
to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

An example of the ranking chart to track the changes of the top 10
bad actors over two months is presented in Fig. 8. It can be observed
from the plot that the total alarm count of the top 10 bad actors
decreased in the current month compared to that in the previous month.
Four bad actors disappeared whereas four new bad actors appeared. In
addition, four bad actors had increasing ranks whereas the ranks of two
other bad actors decreased.
of individual alarms. Potential users include alarm analysts and process
engineers, who will take actions to deal with top 10 bad actors based
the decreasing or increasing of alarm counts, e.g., evaluating whether
some implemented solutions are effective in reducing nuisance alarms,
and determining what alarms require further efforts to bring the alarm
counts down.

Remark 3. This visualization plot is designed to track top 10 bad
actors, which is an important task of periodic alarm audit. Compared
to conventional bar charts and pie charts, this ranking chart allows
for comparisons between different time periods, which involve two
aspects, including the total alarm count of top 10 bad actors and that
4.2. Visualization towards pattern insights
The second type of visualization involves pattern insights, which is
useful for decision-making, but may not be obtained in a straightfor-
ward fashion from the data. In this subsection, two new visualization

58
W. Hu et al.
Fig. 9. An example of the event flow chart of alarm states and operator
responses for the low alarm of a tank level. The vertical axis corresponds to the
sequence index number that indicates a pair of alarm occurrence and clearance
over different periods. The horizontal axis corresponds to the time that indicates
the duration of an alarm state. Two distinct color bars within the alarm states
represent two different operator responses (i.e., green represents running feed
pump 1; blue represents running feed pump 2). (For interpretation of the
references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version
of this article.)
techniques, namely, an event flow chart for event interactions and a
spiral graph for alarm floods, are designed to assist users in identifying
patterns of interest and importance in a visual form as well as to gain
insights of the historical alarm & event data.
(1) Event Flow Chart for Event Interactions
As discussed in Section 2.2, the alarm & event data includes three
pieces of information, namely, alarm messages, process changes, and
operator responses. These events could be related to each other. For
instance, alarms may come on simultaneously or in a sequential order,
due to configuration duplications or physical connections (Hu et al.,
2015; Hu, Wang et al., 2017). Process changes, such as state transitions,
may cause a series of consequence alarms (Hu et al., 2018a). Operator
responses are conducted to acknowledge alarms or cope with abnormali-
ties (ANSI/ISA-18.2, 2009; Hollifield & Habibi, 2010; Hu, Al-Dabbagh et
al., 2016). Such event interactions can be uncovered using the methods
in Hu, Al-Dabbagh et al. (2016), Hu et al. (2018a), Hu et al. (2015) and
Hu, Wang et al. (2017). In order to see interactions and to make them
easily understandable, it is necessary to present information, such as
orders, frequencies, and time intervals, in a good visual form. Monroe,
Lan, Lee, Plaisant, and Shneiderman (2013) proposed an event flow
chart to transform an entire dataset of temporal event records into
an aggregated display, allowing analysis of patterns and trends in a
population-level. This visualization technique is exploited to present the
interactions between alarms and related events. An event flow chart
consists of three essential components:
(i) A sequence of alarms and related events is shown as an event
flow in one row of the chart;
(ii) Alarms and related events are presented in a chronological order,
and different alarms and events are denoted by different symbols
and colors;
(iii) An interactive design is incorporated to enable the alignment
of events in different perspectives and the simplification of the
event flow.
An example of the event flow chart to visualize the alarm state
transitions and the related operator responses is presented in Fig. 9. It
can be observed from the plot that two types of operator responses were
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Control Engineering Practice 79 (2018) 50–64
Fig. 10. An example of the simplified plot of the event flow chart presented in
Fig. 9. The height of each area indicates the frequency of the associated operator
response (i.e., marked by a blue or green color). The topmost area indicates that
there were no responses for three alarm occurrences. (For interpretation of the
references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version
of this article.)
effective in clearing the alarms. In order to have abstracted information
and compare different cases, the event flow chart is simplified using
the method in Monroe et al. (2013), and accordingly, Fig. 10 presents
a simplified graph. The width of the red area before the blue or green
bar indicates the time to respond to the alarm occurrences. The width of
that after the blue or green bar denotes the time for the alarm to return
to normal after a response. It can be observed from the plot that the
response marked by the green color was more timely and effective than
the response marked by the blue color.
Remark 4. This visualization plot is designed to present the abstracted
information about interactions between alarms and related events. It
can be used to augment flow diagrams, such as the petri nets in Hu, Al-
Dabbagh et al. (2016), which are used to show what actions are usually
taken to respond to alarms. Potential users include alarm analysts and
process engineers, who can discover interesting patterns from historical
data, e.g., what actions are usually taken to respond to certain alarms
and whether or not they are effective. Such knowledge can be used to
train new operators or to improve operator responses.
(2) Spiral Graph for Alarm Floods
Alarm floods are situations where the number of annunciated alarms
is more than that can be effectively managed by an operator. They
are usually caused by propagated abnormalities in interconnected ar-
eas (Stanic et al., 2010; Wang et al., 2017) and may lead to serious
consequences (Beebe et al., 2013; EEMUA-191, 2013; Pariyani et al.,
2010; Wang et al., 2016). Beebe et al. (2013), Vogel-Heuser et al. (2015),
Charbonnier et al. (2015, 2016), Wang et al. (2016), Hu, Wang et al.
(2016) and Wang et al. (2017) investigated the causes and consequences
of alarm floods, and proposed systematic methods to cope with alarm
floods. In practice, visualization techniques are needed to help users to
observe alarm floods and discover hidden problems from historical data.
Here, a spiral graph (Weber et al., 2011) is adapted to visualize alarm
flood situations. A preliminary work is presented in Hu, Chen, and Shah
(2018b). This visualization plot consists of the following essential parts:
(i) A spiral grows clockwise and continuously in circles with each
circle representing a certain time period, e.g., one day;
(ii) Each point on one circle represents a time instant of a smaller
time resolution depending on the sampling rate, e.g., one second;
W. Hu et al.
(iii) Colors are used to represent values of the time series related to
alarm flood situations.
The spiral graph has several advantages: it makes an effective use
of screen space and can visualize data over a very long time period; it
supports effective comparisons in two dimensions, namely, comparisons
in a neighborhood and comparisons of circles; it allows for an easy
observation of periodic behaviors and trends. Using this graph, the user
cannot only identify when an alarm flood starts and ends, but also
determines which day or what time tends to receive more alarm floods.
Alarm floods are identified, by comparing the burst alarm rate 𝜈(𝑡)
in Eq. (4) with the benchmark thresholds. A variable 𝜓 indicating the
presence of alarm floods is calculated as
⎧ 1 if 𝜈(𝑡) ≥ 𝛥 & 𝜓(𝑡 − 1) = 0,
⎪ observe if the data spreads over a very long time period. In comparison,
𝜓(𝑡) = ⎨ 0 if 𝜈(𝑡) < 𝛥 & 𝜓(𝑡 − 1) = 1, (8)
⎪𝜓(𝑡 − 1) otherwise,
⎩
where 𝛥 and 𝛥 denote the benchmark thresholds to identify the start
and end of an alarm flood. According to ANSI/ISA-18.2 (2009), the
benchmark thresholds are 𝛥 = 10 and 𝛥 = 5 based on a time bin of
size 𝑇 = 600 s in Eq. (4). The index values 𝜓(𝑡) = 1 and 𝜓(𝑡) = 0
represent the presence and absence of an alarm flood at time instant 𝑡,
respectively. 𝜓(𝑡) is initialized to be 𝜓(0) = 0. An alarm flood is said
to begin at time instant 𝑡𝑠 if 𝜓(𝑡𝑠 ) = 1 & 𝜓(𝑡𝑠 − 1) = 0, and end at time
instant 𝑡𝑒 if 𝜓(𝑡𝑒 ) = 0 & 𝜓(𝑡𝑒 − 1) = 1.
The spiral graph to visualize alarm flood situations is implemented
based on the following discussion. Given an alarm data spanning 𝑁
days, the time instant 𝑡 is scaled to the range [1, 𝑁 ∗ 86, 400] (1 day
is equal to 86,400 s). Then the angle in the spiral graph for each time
instant 𝑡 is
2𝜋𝑡
𝜃(𝑡) = + 2𝛽𝜋. (9)
𝛼 hensive view of the alarm system performance.
More specifically, given an alarm data spanning 𝑁 days, the indexing
signal 𝜓(𝑡) in Eq. (8) that indicates the presence of alarm floods
is calculated first. Then, the coordinates at each time instant 𝑡 are
calculated as
( )
𝜋
𝑥(𝑡) = 𝛾𝜃(𝑡) cos 𝜃(𝑡) + ,
2)
( (10)
𝜋 dynamic HDAP has the following special features:
𝑦(𝑡) = 𝛾𝜃(𝑡) sin 𝜃(𝑡) + ,
2
where
2𝜋𝑡
𝜃(𝑡) = + 2𝛽𝜋, (11)
86400
where 𝛽 and 𝛾 are a user specified parameters to adjust the radiuses of
the innermost and outermost spiral circles, respectively. The specifica-
tion of the two parameters 𝛽 and 𝛾 is up to the size of the screen so as to
give users the best view. As a result, a spiral graph with 𝑁 continuous
circles is produced. Each circle of the graph represents 24 h. As the final
step, the values of a certain variable are represented by different colors
in the spiral graph.
Figs. 11 and 12 present spiral graphs for the burst alarm rate 𝜈(𝑡)
and the alarm flood index 𝜓(𝑡), respectively. Each of the graph displays
a time series of 30 days, starting at 00 ∶ 00 ∶ 00 at the innermost circle,
and goes clockwise until reaching 23 ∶ 59 ∶ 59 at the outermost circle.
From Fig. 11, the time periods (i.e., marked by green colors) which are
likely to receive less alarms and time periods which tend to have high
alarm rates (i.e., marked by red colors) can be observed. It can also
be found that most points on the spiral are green and yellow, implying
the alarm system was healthy in most of the studied period. But there
are still quite a few spots with red colors, indicating high alarm rates
and alarm flood situations. According to Fig. 12, alarm floods were
quite common and they were more likely to appear during the following
periods: 3 ∶ 00 − 4 ∶ 00 h, 11 ∶ 00 − 13 ∶ 00 h, and 19 ∶ 00 − 23 ∶ 00 h.
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Control Engineering Practice 79 (2018) 50–64
Remark 5. This visualization plot is designed to observe alarm flood
situations. Compared to bar charts, heatmaps, and line graphs, this spiral
graph has the following advantages: (1) A bar chart shows the statistical
information, e.g., the number of alarm floods over different hours or
days. In comparison, the spiral graph provides more details, users cannot
only tell which hours or days tend to receive more alarm floods, but also
identify the exact time instants when an alarm flood starts and ends. (2)
A heat map presents alarm rates in two coordinates, namely, time and
day. However, the continuity of the data is broken, making users hard to
observe the changes from the end of one day to the beginning of the next
day. In comparison, the spiral graph can visualize data over a very long
time period without breaking its continuity with respect to time. (3) A
line graph, such as the alarm burst plot (Hollifield & Habibi, 2010; Wang
et al., 2016), shows the alarm rate on the time axis, which is straight.
Due to the limitation of the screen width, alarm floods become hard to
the spiral graph makes effective use of space and can effectively visualize
data on a single line growing spirally. Potential users of a spiral graph
include alarm analysts and process engineers, who conduct alarm flood
analysis and develop solutions. More specifically, based on periodic
patterns, the user need to think about why these time periods tend to
receive more alarm floods, could such periodic patterns be caused by
transitions of work shifts, and what solutions should be taken to improve
operators’ workflow patterns. The user can also identify which alarm
floods are long and serious, and then investigates how to prevent the
reproduction of such alarm floods.
4.3. Visualization towards realtime application
The previously discussed visualization plots are specifically designed
for off-line analysis, and thus they are static. This subsection presents
two dynamic plots towards realtime visualization, namely, the dynamic
high density plot and the dynamic 3D bar chart, to allow for a compre-
(1) Dynamic High Density Alarm Plot
The High Density Alarm Plot (HDAP) in Kondaveeti et al. (2012)
provides an overview picture of the whole alarm system by tracking
the occurrences of individual alarms in the studied time period. This
subsection turns this static plot into a dynamic plot for realtime appli-
cations. Comparing to the static one in Kondaveeti et al. (2012), the new
(i) The plot presents the alarm counts for different alarm variables
in a short recent period (e.g., hours or days);
(ii) The time window, color bins, and alarm orders update with time
(alarm tags are sorted by their alarm counts in a descending
order);
(iii) An alarm burst plot is shown to indicate alarm flood situations,
and benchmark thresholds are included and shown as horizontal
lines.
Fig. 13 presents an example of the dynamic HDAP. The upper subplot
shows the burst alarm rate, namely, the number of alarm occurrences in
each 10 min time bin, and compares it to the red line, which indicates
the benchmark threshold of alarm floods (namely, 10 alarms/10 min)
in ANSI/ISA-18.2 (2009). Depending on the application, the threshold
of the acceptable alarm rate (namely, 1 alarm/10 min) can also be
included in the alarm burst plot. The upper and lower subplots update
with time in a direction as indicated by the black arrow at the bottom
of Fig. 13. It can be observed from this plot that the alarm system had
a good performance in the past day according to the low burst alarm
rate in the upper plot. However, the increase of the burst alarm rate in
the most recent hour indicates the emerging of new alarm floods. This
can be also observed from the lower plot when more bins of red and
orange colors appear. Moreover, it can be also observed that there was
a group of correlated alarms, namely, ‘‘Tag10.FAU’’, ‘‘Tag14.FAU’’, and
‘‘Tag15.FAU’’, since they appeared almost simultaneously.
W. Hu et al. Control Engineering Practice 79 (2018) 50–64

Fig. 11. An example of the spiral graph to show burst alarm rates. Green colors denote lower burst alarm rates, whereas yellow and orange colors represent higher
burst alarm rates. Red colors indicate alarm flood situations. The spiral starts at 00 ∶ 00 ∶ 00 of the first day at the innermost circle, and goes clockwise until reaching
23 ∶ 59 ∶ 59 of the last data at the outermost circle. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of
this article.)

Fig. 12. An example of the spiral graph to show alarm flood periods, which are highlighted by orange colors. The spiral starts at 00 ∶ 00 ∶ 00 of the first day at the
innermost circle, and goes clockwise until reaching 23 ∶ 59 ∶ 59 of the last data at the outermost circle. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure
legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

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W. Hu et al. Control Engineering Practice 79 (2018) 50–64

Fig. 13. An example of the dynamic high density alarm plot. The upper subplot displays the burst alarm rate in a moving window. The lower subplot displays alarm
counts for the top 20 bad actors in a time window of 24 h. The alarm count for one specific alarm variable in a time bin of 10 min is color coded and shown as a
color bin. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

Remark 6. This visualization plot is designed to present an overview

picture of the whole alarm system by tracking the occurrences of
individual alarms in realtime. Compared to the static plot in Kondaveeti
et al. (2012), this plot is dynamic and updated with time, and thus it
can be used in realtime to assist online alarm monitoring. Moreover, it
includes a subplot to display the burst alarm rate and compare it with
the benchmark threshold, and thus can help users to identify alarm flood
situations. Plant operators are the potential users. By observing this
dynamic plot, plant operators can identify if the alarm system has a good
performance, what the top bad actors are, as well as whether there is any
chattering alarm, repeating alarm, standing alarm, correlated alarm, and
alarm flood. Based on such observations, actions will be taken to reduce
nuisance alarms and improve alarm management.

(2) Dynamic 3D Bar Chart

In addition to representing alarm counts using color bins shown in
Fig. 13, this part proposes a dynamic 3D bar chart to display the same
information using vertical bars. Analogous to the dynamic HDAP, the
3D bar chart has the following features:
(i) The chart presents the alarm information in three dimensions,
including the time on the 𝑥-axis, the names of alarms on the 𝑦-
axis, and the alarm counts on the 𝑧-axis;
(ii) The time window, bar lengths, and alarm orders update with
time (alarm tags are sorted by their alarm counts in a descending
order);
(iii) An alarm burst plot is integrated to denote alarm flood situations,
and benchmark thresholds are included and shown as horizontal
lines.
Fig. 14. An example of the dynamic 3D bar chart. Each bar indicates the
alarm count for one alarm variable over a 10 min time period. The black curve
indicates the burst alarm rate. The green and red lines represents benchmark
thresholds of 1 and 10 alarms over a 10 min time period.
a bad performance of the alarm system. It can also be found that the
alarm ‘‘Tag48.LO’’ was chattering or repeating, which accounts for the
peaks of the black line. Overall, the alarm system had alarm floods and
alarm chattering problems in the recent 2 h time period, and thus actions
were required to solve the two problems.

Fig. 14 presents an example of the dynamic 3D bar chart. From the
plot, the alarms that have high alarm rates in the most recent time
period can be observed from the vertical bars, and the changes of the
burst alarm rate can be observed from the black curve. The time window
moves in a direction as indicated by the black arrow at the bottom of
Fig. 14. It can be found from the black line that the burst alarm rate was
fluctuating around the benchmark threshold of alarm floods, indicating
Remark 7. This visualization plot is designed to present an overview
picture of the whole alarm system in realtime. Compared to the previous
dynamic high density alarm plot, this plot has the same function, but
presents data in a different visual form. Plant operators are the potential
users. This visualization plot provides an alternative to the dynamic high
density plot for realtime alarm monitoring.

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5. Concluding remarks
This paper studied visualization of industrial alarm & event data,
which complies with the new research and development trend of
industrial alarm monitoring and management in the era of big data.
By transforming data into visual representations, users have a clear and
rapid understanding of the insights as well as hidden patterns, which
can lead to improved decision making support in alarm rationalization,
management, and monitoring. This paper presented a comprehensive
literature survey on the existing alarm data visualization plots, and
categorized them into three classes based on the input information.
Their characteristics were compared from the perspectives of event
types, dimensions, online/offline applications, and the amount of data.
Further, new visualization techniques were designed based on generic
visualization plots or were motivated by special requirements of indus-
trial alarm systems. These new visualization techniques are capable of
providing a comprehensive, informative, and intuitive understanding of
the performance and behaviors of industrial alarm systems.
According to Munzner (2015) and Sedlmair, Meyer, & Munzner
(2012), validation is critical to bring the designed visualization tech-
niques to the deployment step in real systems. A significant limitation of
the current work is the lack of validation from industrial users, especially
plant operators, even though the designed visualization in this work has
successfully attracted interests from industry. Thus, a future direction
is to implement these visualization plots in real systems and improve
the design based on the limitations of the systems and feedback from
industrial users. In addition, more efforts will be devoted in the future
to design better visualizations, e.g., incorporating efficient interactive
design based on industrial workflows, and developing better alarm
display panels for alarm monitoring, so as to provide efficient visual
analytics to reveal problems and discover patterns from alarm & event
data.
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