Alarm flood is one of the main problems in the alarm systems of industrial process. Alarm root-cause analysis and alarm prioritization are good for alarm flood reduction. This paper proposes a systematic rationalization method for multivariate correlated alarms to realize the root cause analysis and alarm prioritization. An information fusion based interpretive structural model is constructed according to the data-driven partial correlation coefficient calculation and process knowledge modification. This hierarchical multi-layer model is helpful in abnormality propagation path identification and root-cause analysis. Revised Likert scale method is adopted to determine the alarm priority and reduce the blindness of alarm handling. As a case study, the Tennessee Eastman process is utilized to show the effectiveness and validity of proposed approach. Alarm system performance comparison shows that our rationalization methodology can reduce the alarm flood to sonic extent and improve the performance. (C) 2015 The Chemical Industry and Engineering Society of China, and Chemical Industry Press. All rights reserved.