Controlling Alarm States at the Area Level

Description

This article from InSource shows how to control how alarms are generated and viewed at an area level instead of working with individual alarm states in Wonderware's Application Server environment as part of System Platform. This is accomplished using the "Plant State" function. 

• Author: Chris Selph
• Published: 2/16/17
• Applies to: Application Server

Details

The idea behind Plant State is to set the way all Alarms in a given area behave during specific operating conditions for that Area such as Startup, Changeover etc so as not to inundate the operator with alarms that mean nothing while the plant/Area is in that operating condition.

The Plant State function leverages a built in attribute on an Area object as seen here in the object viewer. The value of the Plant State attribute is controlled by setting it via an animation link or script etc during runtime.

The possible values are configured in the IDE and associated with Alarm Modes of either "Enable", "Disable" or "Silence".

You can add as many Plant States as desired.

There needs to be some way for the operator to set the Plant State value here is a simple example using radio buttons in an ArchestrA Graphic:

Create a new ArchestrA Graphic or edit an existing one.

Place a radio button and configure as follows:

This will look similar in Runtime and will set the Plant State immediately as seen in the Alarm Object below.