Configure Equipment for Scheduling

To use schedules in a Citect SCADA system, your project needs to include an equipment hierarchy (that incorporates the equipment you would like to automate) and equipment states that control the operation of your equipment.

There are two ways you can configure equipment and equipment states in a Citect SCADA system:

• Equipment Editor — If you are starting a new project (or adding a new area or process to an existing project), you can use Equipment Editor to generate tags (see Using Equipment Editor to Generate Tags).
• Citect Studio — If you have a project with existing tags, you can use Citect Studio to associate equipment with your tags (see Define an Equipment Association for a Tag).

In both cases, you need to consider the following equipment state properties when creating a schedule for a piece of equipment:

• Entry Action — defines the activity that occurs when an equipment state is initiated. It is configured using a Cicode expression, for example, you could use an expression that writes a value to a variable tag.

Note: Entry actions are not supported for equipment states that are associated with a BACnet device (see Integrate BACnet Schedules into Scheduler).

• Delay — allows you to postpone an entry action for a specified period of time. A delay can be used to turn on equipment sequentially, thereby avoiding a power spike.
• Repeat Action — defines a repeat action that occurs when the entry action has completed. The repeat action will reoccur according to the specified Period, though it will not occur until the previous repeat action is complete.

If you are using Equipment Editor to configure equipment, these properties are defined when you add an equipment state to an equipment type (see Add a State to an Equipment Type).

If you are manually defining equipment for an existing set of tags, you can define these properties in the Equipment State properties (see Manually Define Equipment).

See Also

Published June 2018