A tabu search (TS) based approach is proposed for alarming processing in power systems. First, several existing evaluation criteria describing the alarm processing problem are briefly discussed, and a new criterion is proposed. Secondly, a novel method is developed to solve this problem using a TS based method. Finally, two examples are used to demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the developed method. The paper also presents a comparison between the developed TS based and the more established genetic algorithm (GA) based approaches to the alarm processing problem. Many simulation results show that the TS-based approach is more efficient than the GA based approach. Key features of this proposed method are that it has solid mathematical foundation and can find multiple global optimal solutions directly and efficiently in a single run. This is very suitable for complex alarm processing problems especially for situations with missing or false alarms, because different combinations of events can produce the same set of alarms under these circumstances. The test results suggest that the developed TS based method is promising.