Abstract

Due to the imminent danger involved in the petroleum operation domain, only well trained workers are allowed to operate in offshore oil process plants. Although their vast experience, human errors may happen during emergency situations as a result of the overwhelmed amount of information generated by a great deal of triggered alarms. Alarm devices have become very cheap leading petroleum equipment manufacturers to overuse them transferring safety responsibility to operators. Not rarely, accident reports cite poor operators’ understanding of the actual plant status due to too many active alarms. In this paper, we present an alarm management system focused on guiding offshore platform operators’ attention to the essential information that calls for immediate action during emergency situations. We use a multi-agent based approach as the basis of our alarm management system for assisting operators to make sense of alarm avalanche scenarios.