Alarms, acknowledging and silencing horn

Hi, 

Can anyone tell me if it's possible to both Acknowledge and silence the horn by pressing the acknowledge button alone, even for alarms that are still 'active'.

My reasons are that our operators are simply silencing the horn for alarms but are not looking at the alarm screen and acknowledging the alarms, we have sometimes very frequent alarms and warning alarms can go unnoticed among the critical alarms in the alarm banner.

ideally I would like to remove the silence horn button thereby forcing the operator to look at the alarm screen but acknowledging an alarm does not silence the horn.

Also would it be possible to call up the alarm screen automatically upon getting an alarm? Another Idea would be to move the 'silence horn' button from the alarm banner and onto the alarm screen.

Thank you in advance for any help in this matter.

Lee Wren.

  • I wouldn't recommend calling up the alarm screen automatically, because an operator or other user sometimes needs to focus on part of the process without interruptions. And all OWS would go to the alarmscreen all of the time. Especially because it seems there are a lot active critical alarms in your plant.
    Moving the 'silence horn' to the alarm screen is a good option. It forces operators to check the alarms. On the other hand when they're monitoring part of the process, they might not want to switch to the alarmscreen to ack. the horn and go back to the processdisplay.

    The code behind the silence horn button is:
    frsWriteValue "0", "DVSYS.THISUSER/HORN.A_CV"
    (this is the same as: frsCommonTasks "HornSilence" )
    Adding this line to the alarm acknowledge button on (all) faceplates will acknowledge both the alarm and the horn.