Unique & relevant
Every alarm requires a unique operator response. If two alarms call for the same action, one must go.
ALARM MANAGEMENT
What an operatorshouldn’t have toread in 90 seconds.
Industrial control rooms drown in alarm floods. EEMUA 191 says a healthy operator sees fewer than 6 alarms per ten minutes; in practice, a single compressor trip can fire forty in under two. This page lets you replay a real cascade — and watch what intelligent prioritization does to it.
2,000+
alarms/day in a typical SCADA
94%
of those are nuisance or repeat
< 6
per 10 min · EEMUA target
SCENARIO · COMPRESSOR SURGE
CS-038 · Permian East. Two control rooms. Two outcomes.
Stage-2 discharge pressure climbs. A surge develops. The PLC trips the compressor. Press Play — same incident, same tags, but the two boards diverge fast.
00:00:00 / 00:02:00
Legacy SCADAStock alarm engine · CS-038 console
0 UNACKCOGNITIVE LOAD · 30s0/30s
No alarms · system nominal
Aevus IntelligentRoot-cause grouping · rank-aware
0 UNACKCOGNITIVE LOAD · 30s0/30s
No alarms · system nominal
WHAT YOU’RE SEEINGThe left board is a stock alarm engine: every event the PLC publishes hits the operator, scored by static priority. The right board groups every cascading event under its root cause (PT-201A · HIGH DISCHARGE), surfaces the escalation to HIGH-HIGH and the resulting ESD trip as critical follow-ups, and quietly suppresses noise. Toggle Quiet Mode to hide low-priority context — useful for night-shift escalation, harmful for shift handoff.
PRINCIPLES
Six Tenets of Good Alarm Management
Drawn from EEMUA 191 and ISA 18.2 — the two specifications industrial control rooms are audited against. They aren’t glamorous. They are the difference between an operator who trusts their panel and an operator who learned to ignore it.
Ranked by consequence
Priority maps to consequence and time-to-act. Static "high/medium/low" without context is noise.
Suppress the cascade
When a root cause triggers ten downstream events, surface the root — collapse the rest.
Bounded rate
Steady-state alarm rate stays below 6/10 min per operator. Floods are an alarm-system failure, not an operator failure.
Acknowledge to learn
Every ack carries context. The system gets quieter over time as nuisance alarms are tuned out.
Quiet by design
Operators should hear the system only when something needs them. Silence is a feature.
Want this on your stack?
Aevus deploys above your existing SCADA and historian — no rip-and-replace, no PLC changes. Most teams see alarm volume fall 60–80% in the first quarter.
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Case: 1,200-Alarm Flood
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AI Diagnostics
Where AI earns its keep in the control room.
See Aevus in action →
Ready to see how this applies to your operation? Start a pilot conversation — no commitment, no field changes.