Process alarm prediction using deep learning and word embedding methods.

Industrial alarm systems play an essential role for the safe management of process operations. With the increase in automation and instrumentation of modern process plants, the number of alarms that the operators manage has also increased significantly. The operators are expected to make critical decisions in the presence of flooding alarms, poorly configured and maintained alarms and many nuisance alarms. In this environment, if the incoming alarms can be correctly predicted before they actually occur, the operators may have a chance to address and possibly avoid abnormal behaviors by taking corrective actions in time. Inspired by the application of deep learning in natural language processing, this paper presents an alarm prediction method based on word embedding and recurrent neural networks to predict the next alarm in a process setting. This represents both a novel approach to alarm management as well as a novel application of natural language processing and deep learning techniques to this problem. The proposed method is applied to an actual case study to demonstrate its performance.