Hi,
I have a v9.3.1 system and would like to implement some conditional alarming to prevent alarm floods. Can anyone give me some advice on an easy way to achieve this? For example are there any group or global parameters which allow you to disable all the alarms in an module or area etc? Initially I would like for example to disable module alarms which are generated via signals from a package unit on profibus if the comms link is down etc.
Thanks.
Hi DVUser007,
That depends very much on the basis of your control modules. For example I sit in Europe and we tend to use PCSD as a basis for all of our configuration. With PCSD there is conditional alarming functionality built into the software. This provides flags which you can write to to conditionally disable an alarm. It even illustrates that it is conditionally diasbled on the detail display. You can then develop logic to write to these flags in the event of an alarm flood. For example you may wish to use a CEM block to monitor conditions (maybe an enable switch from a supervisor and a watchdog signal on your package) and then when the right combination of conditions becomes true, set an output to the conditional alarm functionality.
If you are using PCSD your other option with the package is to configure a watchdog to monitor the communications. If you are using the standard soft modules they have a flag to for a watchdog input. If this is set it conditionally disables the alarms in that module.
If you are not using PCSD, then I am afraid you are starting from scratch. In this case I would recommend building some logic based on the CEM and use this to write to the alarm enable flags in the function blocks. For example if it was an AI you would possibly write to the AI1/HI_ENAB parameter.
Kind regards
scottjturner