The paper entitled “Alarm data monitoring of water treatment in an oil platform” proposes a method to

identify a fault detection algorithm by monitoring alarms using a neural network model. The revised
paper shows many improvements over the original one. The title has been modified and is better now.
The writing is also improved. The overall presentation is more acceptable.

However, a few concerns still remain unanswered:

- One of the concerns I had raised previously was that in real situations, alarms are not activated
only because of faults, but also due to noise, disturbances, process changes and many other
factors. In this case, the ANN might not work as well as we expect. What is claimed is that in
such situation the ANN generates a “NOT KNOWN” message. It is important to prove this at
least using simulation. I present a few scenarios and would like to see what the FDD comes up
with (all seem plausible):
o Both LAL-02 and LAL-06 alarms
o ACAH-01 alarm
o Both ACAH-03 and ACAH-05

It is extremely important to understand that, in real situations, alarms are not as clean and clear
as proposed in the paper.

- Also, related to my comment above, it is claimed in the abstract that “These situations are
worsened in offshore production platforms because of the many operational, environmental
and human hazards involved” which I absolutely agree with. But I would like to know how these
problems are addressed with the proposed algorithm? And how the results are validated and
verified?
- There is much emphasis both in the paper and the author’s response on the dynamics of the
proposed FDD system. However, I fail to see how this FDD is dynamic. A fault is identified when
and only when all the alarms related to that particular fault are activated (or at least this is what
is shown in simulations). So there is no dynamics. I appreciate if the authors could elaborate on
that.
- In response to a comment I raised they write “Our manuscript is not only about the
development of the FDD based on data from alarms. It is also about the development of an
alarm system to a new, important process”. I disagree with the latte. Development of an alarm
system for a process is important but not new. It does not matter if the process itself is new or
not. It is a routine design procedure that can be carried out by an engineer and does not have
any research value. In fact the outcome of this part is to have alarms on all the measured
variables with appropriate limits, which is the common practice in industry. What I see as a
contribution is only part one: “development of the FDD based on data from alarms”. To this end,
I still believe that most of Section 3.1 is not necessary and can be summarized in one table.
- Another comment I raised was that “The timing of alarms is not considered in this study”. In the
response the authors write: “the time between two alarms was not high because the dynamics
of the processes were fast.” That might be the case here, but it limits the application of your
proposed method to fast processes (which you know are rare in process industry). And the
solution they propose is “the use of a more sensible variable to monitor with an alarm or even
use a hybrid FDD scheme in which trends of variables are also considered”. Again supporting my
claim that the proposed method can be used for fast processes only, since what they propose
for a slow process is to use other methods and not theirs. This is the main drawback of the
proposed approach. All the alarms should be available for the system to detect the faults. This
again means a static (and not dynamic) FDD. I appreciate it if this issue is addressed carefully
within the paper.