"Abnormal situation management" (ASM) in general refers to the various tasks required for online fault diagnosis and also hazard mitigation. Although quite a few ASM-related studies have already been carried out in the past, none of them addressed the wide range of issues consistently and rigorously with the same modeling tool. An automata-based strategy is therefore proposed in this work to synthesize all operating procedures needed for diagnostic tests and also other emergency response operations in the batch processes. The proposed model building techniques are suitable not only for characterizing all components in any given process, but also for representing the operation targets of all ASM tasks. Finally, notice that every resulting procedure can be readily expressed with an implementable sequential function chart (SFC). (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.