Provide Cause and Response Information to Operators

Plant SCADA allows you to associate cause and response information with an alarm tag. This means you can describe the circumstances that are likely to cause an alarm, and the appropriate course of action required to address the alarm. This information can then be presented to an operator at runtime.

The properties you can associate with an alarm tag include:

• Cause — a description of the cause of an alarm.

• Response — a description of the appropriate response to an alarm.

• Response Time — the period of time in which the specified response needs to be acted upon.

• Consequence — a description of the likely outcome if the suggested response is not acted upon within the specified response time.

You can configure up to eight sets of cause and response properties for each alarm tag.

This information is presented to an operator at runtime using the following Cicode functions:

• AlarmGetDsp

• AlarmGetFieldRec

• AlmBrowseGetField.

For example, you could use the following Cicode to retrieve cause and response information from a displayed alarm list:

// Example of getting alarm responses from an Animation Number of a displayed alarm list

FUNCTION GetAlarmResponsesForAN(INT AN)

INT i;

STRING cause, response, time, consequence;

INT Count = AlarmGetDsp(AN, "ResponseNum");

FOR i = 1 to Count DO

cause = AlarmGetDsp(AN, "Cause" + IntToStr(i));

response = AlarmGetDsp(AN, "Response" + IntToStr(i));

time = AlarmGetDsp(AN, "RespTime" + IntToStr(i));

consequence = AlarmGetDsp(AN, "Consequence" + IntToStr(i));

// DO something with the retrieved fields

// …

END

END

If your project is based on the SxW or Tab Style templates, you can also view cause and response information at runtime via the Cause and Response dialog. See Display Cause and Response Information.

To specify cause and response information for an alarm tag, you need to use the Alarming view in the Setup activity. See Add Cause and Response Information to Alarms.