Patent ID: 7936260

Claim:
A method of identifying potentially redundant alarms in a plurality of alarms, comprising: assigning an alarm category from a plurality of alarm categories to each alarm in the plurality of alarms; identifying an incident interval, wherein a first alarm of the plurality of alarms is considered to have occurred coincidently with a second alarm of the plurality of alarms when a time of occurrence of the first alarm is within the incident interval before or after a time of occurrence of the second alarm; computing a coefficient of correlation between each distinct pair of alarm categories in the plurality of alarm categories, wherein the coefficient of correlation indicates a probability that an alarm of a second category of the distinct pair of alarm categories occurs coincidentally within the plurality of alarms with an alarm of a first category of the distinct pair of alarm categories, given that the alarm of the first category has occurred; identifying a threshold value of the coefficient of correlation; and constructing a list of potentially redundant alarms comprising distinct pairs of alarm categories having the coefficient of correlation computed for the distinct pair equal to or exceeding the threshold value of the coefficient of correlation.