Extracting Value from Industrial Alarms and Events: A Data-Driven Approach Based on Exploratory Data Analysis

Alarm and event logs are an immense but latent source of knowledge commonly undervalued in industry. Though, the current massive data-exchange, high efficiency and strong competitiveness landscape, boosted by Industry 4.0 and IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) paradigms, does not accommodate such a data misuse and demands more incisive approaches when analyzing industrial data. Advances in Data Science and Big Data (or more precisely, Industrial Big Data) have been enabling novel approaches in data analysis which can be great allies in extracting hitherto hidden information from plant operation data. Coping with that, this work proposes the use of Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) as a promising data-driven approach to pave industrial alarm and event analysis. This approach proved to be fully able to increase industrial perception by extracting insights and valuable information from real-world industrial data without making prior assumptions.