Control Engineering Practice
Call for Papers

Special Issue on 
Advanced Alarm Monitoring for Complex Industrial Facilities

Alarm systems play critically important roles for safety and efficiency of 
modern industrial plants such as oil refineries, petrochemical facilities, 
mineral processes, pulp-paper and power plants. However, in industrial 
practice many existing alarm systems are associated with poor performance, 
with the most common observation being that "there are far too many alarms 
to be handled by industrial plant operators". Driven by the big gap between 
poor performance of industrial alarm systems and their importance for 
operational safety and efficiency, alarm systems have received increasing 
attentions recently from both academic and industrial communities. Many new 
technologies for alarm systems have been emerging in recent several years, 
but certainly there are far more problems to be solved in order to fill the 
big gap mentioned above. These emerging techniques are interdisciplinary, 
involving knowledge from process operation, statistics, signal processing, 
human factors engineering and other areas. In addition, it has become 
apparent that the concepts and related unsolved problems for alarm systems 
are very unique, for example, the detection and removal of nuisance alarms 
including chattering alarms, oscillatory alarms, and long-standing alarms, 
the assignment of dynamic alarm priorities and the analysis and prediction 
of alarm floods. These problems are very different from relatively well-
developed techniques in related areas such as fault detection and 
diagnosis, and process controller design, even though these areas are 
closely interrelated to some extent. Therefore, a special issue on Advanced 
Alarm Monitoring for Complex Industrial Facilities is proposed, in order to 
present some new techniques for alarm systems, and attract more academic 
researchers and industrial practitioners into working and shaping this 
fascinating and important area.

Guest Editors:
Jiandong Wang, Peking University, China, [log in to unmask]
Fan Yang, Tsinghua University, China, [log in to unmask]
Tongwen Chen, University of Alberta, Canada, [log in to unmask]
Sirish L. Shah, University of Alberta, Canada, [log in to unmask]
Chris Aldrich, Curtin University, Perth, Australia, 
[log in to unmask]

Timelines
Submission deadline: 1 Mar 2017
Final acceptance notification: 1 Oct 2017

https://www.journals.elsevier.com/control-engineering-practice/call-for-
papers/special-issue-on-advanced-alarm-monitoring-for-complex-indus