Alarm Management and Rationalization
Applying established alarm-management principles so every alarm is meaningful, prioritized, and actionable — never a wall of noise an operator learns to ignore.
An alarm is a request for operator action
The governing definition, drawn from established process-industry alarm-management practice, is that an alarm exists only to demand a specific operator response within a specific time. Anything that does not require action is information, not an alarm. Kronos applies this strictly across both machines: the fastest, highest-consequence protections are automated in L1 hardware; alarms are reserved for what genuinely needs a human.
Rationalization
Every candidate alarm is rationalized before it ships: it must have a cause, a consequence if ignored, a defined operator response, and enough lead time for that response to matter. Alarms failing any test are demoted to information or removed. This is what prevents the classic failure where operators are trained by experience to dismiss a chronically-crying indicator — and then miss the one time it was real.
| Rationalization test | Must be true |
|---|---|
| Has a clear cause | yes |
| Has a consequence if ignored | yes |
| Has a defined operator response | yes |
| Response has enough lead time to matter | yes |
| Not already handled automatically in L1 | yes |
Priority tied to consequence and time
Alarm priority is assigned from consequence severity and available response time, not from the loudness of the underlying signal. A breeder disruption precursor with tens of milliseconds of margin and a burner plug excursion with seconds of margin sit at the priorities their response windows demand. Priority distribution is monitored: a healthy system spends most of its time with zero or few active alarms, and a sustained high alarm rate is itself treated as a defect to fix, not a normal condition.
Rationalized alarms feed the ranked triage stream and are protected from floods by dynamic suppression — see alerting and triage UX and alarm flood suppression. Alarm-system performance itself is a KPI reviewed on the dashboards.