Patent ID: 7570174

Claim:
A real-time alarm classification system, comprising: a computer infrastructure operable to: use a validated model to generate top contributors associated with an alarm triggered by a sensed abnormal condition; compare the top contributors to contributors of historic RGA (residual gas analyzer) alarms of known root causes that were generated by the validated model; and provide a probable root cause of the sensed abnormal condition when a match is found between the top contributors of the sensed abnormal condition and the contributors associated with the historic RGA alarms of known root causes, wherein the validated model is a validated principal component analysis based batch model created using data of accepted product, which determines a baseline of acceptable product, the validated model is validated by applying a model against accepted and non-accepted product in a current process, the abnormal condition is at least one of a contaminant, process variability and equipment or tool malfunction, and wherein the computer infrastructure is operable to: generate a list of contributors that is characteristic of a specific type of alarm triggered by the RGA, obtain RGA data which is an intensity of mass units associated with chemicals, store the list of the contributors in a database along with associated known root causes which are compared to the top contributors of the sensed abnormal condition, notify a team member of the root cause of the alarm, provide a value to each of the top contributors, and assign a total score based on the matches found between the top contributors of the sensed abnormal condition and the contributors associated with the known root causes, and provide fault detection results as a value of distance to the validated model and provide the top contributors as a percentage to a total deviation to the validated model.