The best way to prevent such a situation is to put in an alarm management system (six alarms per hour is one industry benchmark), but some judicious programming in a DCS can help a lot. If there is no emergency, it's often best to ignore minor errors that have little potential to cause problems.

http://www.controleng.com/search/search-single-display/rx-fo...
"A lot of these devices have both warning limits and alarm limits so that they can offer a philosophy of 'kind of a high' and a 'high-high' rating for how urgent the problem is," says Charlie Piper, product manager of fieldbus programs at Invensys Foxboro. "They might have 20 or 30 warning and alarm limits in these devices," he adds, "so the system should be able to look at those limits and trigger a work order in some cases."

www.mac-solutions.co.uk/.../99-alarm-management-systems-the...
A third party alarm management system therefore provides significantly more data than a DCS integrated alarm management system. The primary function of a ...



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Note added at 1 hr (2014-09-29 14:32:25 GMT)
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http://source.theengineer.co.uk/production-and-automation/sa...
" Attendees will learn the fundamentals of alarm management, through to advanced-level alarm design from the industry experts.

Topics include: examining the key elements of a model alarm-management programme; avoiding operator overload and human stress factors; intelligent alarm sorting, filtering, processing and trend analysis; managing alarm messages and rejecting spurious alarms; data storage, cutting-edge analytics and interpretation of results."