The purpose of an alarm annunciation system in a fossil power plant is to alert the operator to abnormal changes that have occurred in the plant. Because of the functional relationships between alarms, a number of different alarms may be fired simultaneously or consecutively. When multiple alarms are occurred, the control room operators can be overwhelmed. The operator must attempt to identify the failed equipment and instrument and recognize a primary causal alarm against consequential alarms. The purpose of multiple alarm processing is to give the operator the correct information and perception of the malfunction present in the plant. In this thesis, an APS(Alarm Processing System) is studied for fossil power plants. This APS is based on a cause-consequence trees in the knowledge representation aspect for alarm and plant and adapts alarm filtering methods using fired time information in the decision aspect. Through the cause-consequence trees and filtering methods, the Alarm Processing System finds the cause alarm among the fired multiple alarms and calculate the cause degree which represents the possibility of a fault occurring in the instruments of the plant with the information of fired alarm. The knowledge base is built via interviews and questionaries with the expert operators on the Seoul Power plant. Finally, the validity of the studied APS is shown via simulations.
