Chattering and repeating alarms, which repeatedly make transitions between alarm and non-alarm states without operators' response, are the most common form of nuisance alarms encountered in industrial plants. The paper formulates two novel rules to detect chattering alarms caused by random noise and repeating alarms by regular patterns such as oscillation, and proposes an online method to effectively remove chattering and repeating alarms via the m-sample delay timer. Industrial examples are provided to support the formulated rules and to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.