About alarm and events
Alarms
Alarms are sent to the operator station when something occurs that operator has to pay
attention to. It could be a temperature crossing a limit, or a bad value entered in a
process graph. In ProviewR there are special supervision objects that supervise signals
and generates alarms.
Alarm are viewed in the alarmlist.
Priority
The alarms are grouped in four priority levels, A, B, C and D, where A is the highest
priority and D the lowest. How the priority levels are used, depends on the configuration
of the system. It is common that the alarm priorities are used in the following way.
A alarms are marked with red. They have the highest priority and indicate that a serious
error in the plant has occurred that immediately should be taken care of. Often it causes
a stop in the production as long as the alarms are prevailing.
B alarms are marked with yellow. They have a little lower priority, implying an error that
that should soon be taken care of, but the production can continue still some time.
C alarms are marked with blue and D alarms with violet. They indicates minor errors that
are not acute. In many system two alarm levels are enough, and only A and B alarms are used.
Alarmtext
Alarms contain text that is viewed in alarm and event lists. This text is in one row
and maximum 80 characters long. There is also room for longer text, a moretext, that
for example, can contain further explanation of the cause of the alarm, or how it should
be taken care of. The moretext is displayed in the alarm and event lists if the cursor
is placed on the alarmtext.
Acknowledge
An alarm has to be acknowledged by the operator. As long as the alarm is unacknowledged, it
remains in the alarmlist and gives rise to a beep. If an alarm is displayed at several
operator places it is enough for one of the operators to acknowledges the alarm.
Blocking
If an alarm is not relevant during a period, it is possible to block the alarm. You can,
for example, block the alarms for a part of the plant that is not in production. The
blocking can be performed on a separate alarm object, or for a hierarchy. Blocking is a
method of an object, and performed from a blocking window that is opened from the popup
menu for the object. Only users that are granted the privilege RtEvents are allowed
to block alarms.
Blocked objects are displayed in a blocklist.
Messages
Info messages are a group that has the same functionality as alarms. They have lower
priority than alarms and are marked with green.
Events
An event is generated in the same way as alarms, by supervision objects. Also alarms
generates events. Activation of an alarm is counted as an event, as are the return
of the alarm state and the acknowledgement of the alarm.
Events are stored in an eventlist, that contains the latest events. They are also stored
in the event log, where you can go back and look at events for some period of time, and
also see event statistics. For the eventlog there is a search dialog, where you can search
for events with certain search criteria, for example time, eventtype or eventname.
Selectlist
The operator place has a selectlist that contains a list of plant parts in the object tree.
Only alarms from these plant parts will be viewed in the alarm and event lists. The other
alarms and events are filtered away.