Alarm Area Filtering Example

In this example, a large plant has two main areas (AreaA and AreaB), each of which has a set of skilled personnel that operates and monitors only the equipment processes in that area. Because the plant operators are specialized only in their own area and need only respond to the alarms in their area, the plant management has requested that the workstations in each area display only those alarms that are relevant.

Given workstations:

  • WorkstationAreaA
  • WorkstationAreaB

WorkstationAreaA Configuration

The workstation named WorkstationAreaA requires the following configuration:

  1. A text file named, WorkstationAreaA.startup is present in the WorkstationSettings sub-folder of the application.
  2. The <Alarm_Manager> section is added to the WorkstationAreaA.startup file.
  3. The AlarmArea property is set to AreaA so that only alarms configured with an Area property of AreaA are visible on this workstation.

The completed WorkstationAreaA.Startup file should appear as follows:

<Alarm_Manager>
; The alarm areas to show 
AlarmArea = AreaA

The result of the above configuration is that the workstation named WorkstationAreaA will only display alarms whose Area property was configured as "AreaA".

WorkstationAreaB Configuration

The workstation named WorkstationAreaB requires the following configuration:

  1. A text file named, WorkstationAreaB.Startup is present in the WorkstationSettings sub-folder of the application.
  1. The <Alarm_Manager> section is added to the WorkstationAreaA.Startup file.
  1. The AlarmArea property is set to AreaB so that only alarms configured with an Area property of AreaB are visible on this workstation.

The completed WorkstationAreaB.Startup file should appear as follows:

<Alarm_Manager>
; The alarm areas to show 
AlarmArea = AreaB

The result of the above configuration is that the workstation named WorkstationAreaB will only display alarms whose Area property is configured as "AreaB".

Alarm area filtering does not prevent tags from loading, therefore the alarm tags associated with the hidden alarm areas will continue to appear in the Tag Browser (for those users who have the security privileges to access the Tag Browser).