An alarm indicates that an abnormal condition has occurred within your Citect SCADA system. For example, you can configure an alarm to notify you if a piece of hardware is not responding to input commands, or if a variable tag value has moved beyond a specified limit.
Alarms are a fundamental component of a control system, as they indicate to an operator that the system requires attention. When you configure your Citect SCADA system, you should confirm that alarms will be reported to an operator in a way that allows them to respond in an appropriate manner.
Citect SCADA supports two types of alarms:
Alarm indications are added to a project by a system engineer to report specific runtime conditions that require an operator’s attention. Each alarm is associated with one or more tags on the I/O server, depending on the type of configured alarm
Defined alarm types
The following table describes the types of defined alarms you can add to your Citect SCADA project.
Alarm Type | Description |
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Digital alarms activate in response to the state of one or two digital variables. When you define the variable tags for a digital alarm, you can precede a tag name with the logical operator "NOT". This specifies that the OFF state (0) is the triggering condition for the variable tag. Example A digital alarm is configured to activate in response to the following variable tags: Variable Tag A = RFP3_TOL Variable Tag B = NOT MCOL3043 In this scenario, the alarm is triggered when the state of both variables changes to the active state:
You can specify a delay for a digital alarm, which means the alarm only becomes active when the triggering condition spans the duration of the specified delay period. See Add a Digital Alarm. | |
Time stamped alarms are similar to digital alarms, except that a counter variable is used to provide an external time stamp of when a triggering condition occurs, rather than the poll time. Time stamped alarms can only be associated with a single digital variable. | |
Analog alarms are triggered when an analog variable changes beyond one or more specified limits. Each alarm can be configured as any combination of the following types:
See Add an Analog Alarm. | |
An advanced alarm activates when the result of an associated expression changes to true. | |
Multi-digital alarms use the output for up to three digital variables to define eight states. These states represent different combination of true and false values. You can specify which of these states will trigger an alarm. The following eight states represent the possible tag value combinations. The tags are represented in the order tag C, tag B, tag A.
You can indicate whether a particular state will trigger an alarm by applying a value of 1 (indicates an alarm state) or 0 (indicates no alarm will be triggered). | |
Time stamped digital alarms operate via a process where the alarm server is notified if a value changes to a specified digital variable using the Cicode function The alarm server uses this information to update alarms that monitor the variable, allowing an accurate time stamp to be associated with an alarm condition. Time stamped digital alarms activate in response to the state of one or two digital variable tags. When you specify the variable tags, you can precede a tag name with the logical operator "NOT". This specifies that the OFF state (0) is the triggering condition. Events trends can be used in conjunction with time stamped digital alarms to provide millisecond accuracy for both trend and alarm data. See the See Add a Time Stamped Digital Alarm. Note: When a time stamped alarm is used in conjunction with some protocols (such as OFS, OFSOPC and DNP3), a time stamp will be pushed from a tag into an alarm without the need to use AlarmNotifyVarChange. | |
Time stamped analog alarms operate via a process where the alarm server is notified of any value changes to a specified variable using the Cicode function The alarm server uses this information to update the alarms that monitor the variable, allowing an accurate time stamp to be associated with an alarm condition. Time stamped analog alarms are triggered when an analog variable changes beyond one or more specific limits. Each alarm can be configured as any combination of the following types:
Events trends can be used in conjunction with time stamped analog alarms to provide millisecond accuracy for both trend and alarm data. See the See Add a Time Stamped Analog Alarm. Note: When a time stamped alarm is used in conjunction with some protocols (such as OFS, OFSOPC and DNP3), a time stamp will be pushed from a tag into an alarm without the need to use AlarmNotifyVarChange. |
The system subscribes to the tags associated with each configured alarm, and polls them at a rate specified by the Citect.ini parameter
When a change in value is detected, a notification is sent to the alarm server for processing. The alarm server evaluates each notification against the conditions that define each alarm, and generates an alarm if the conditions are met.
For more information on adding configured alarms to a Citect SCADA project, see Configure Alarms.
Citect SCADA regularly runs diagnostic routines to monitor the performance of internal operations associated with any connected peripheral equipment. If the system detects any abnormal conditions, such as an I/O device that is not responding to input commands, a hardware alarm is generated.
Hardware alarms notify an operator of circumstances such as:
Hardware alarms are fully integrated in Citect SCADA, which means there is no need to manually configure them in a project. However, you need to carefully consider how they are reported to an operator.
If your project is based on one of the Citect SCADA starter projects, a hardware alarm count can be viewed on the alarm banner, and a list is displayed on the dedicated hardware alarms page.
Note: Do not allow your system to have any recurring hardware alarms.
There are two hardware alarm fields that are not always shown on the hardware alarms pages. ERRPAGE will display the name of the page that was displayed when the error was detected. This is useful for finding errors caused by improperly programmed animations. ERRDESC provides information that is specific to the type of the alarm. For example, if the alarm is an I/O Device error, ERRDESC shows the name of the device.
Note: A timeout applies on hardware alarms, so that old hardware alarms will be inactive as per [Alarm]HardHoldTime parameter. Unlike configured alarms, all inactive hardware alarms will be removed immediately.
Polling is used to monitor a system for the conditions that define an alarm. This process is evaluated by the alarm server, which generates an alarm whenever it detects the conditions that define an alarm.
When the alarm server generates an alarm, it is reported to an operator via the runtime interface. If your project is based on a Citect SCADA starter project, alarms are reported in the following ways:
For more information, see Viewing Alarms.
You can also add content to your graphics pages that are animated when specific alarm conditions occur (see Using Alarm Properties as Tags).
Information about alarms is provided in the following sections:
Published June 2018