Add a Multi-Digital Alarm

Equipment

The name of the equipment associated with the multi-digital alarm. Select a name from the drop-down list of existing equipment definitions, or enter a name.

There is a limit of 254 characters across the Equipment and Item Name fields, including any separating periods (.).

Item Name

The name of the item with which the alarm is associated.

Items form part of an equipment hierarchy. They can be used to associate tags, alarms and trends with a particular attribute of a physical piece of equipment (see Items).

There is a limit of 254 characters across the Equipment and Item Name, including any separating periods (.).

If you leave this field blank, the last 63 characters of the Alarm Tag field will be used for the Item Name. Be aware that the Alarm Tag allows 79 characters, while Tag Item has a maximum of 63 characters. This may result in compiler errors if the combination of '<Equipment>.<TagItem>' is not unique.

Note: When defining an item name, avoid using the reserved words. If you use any of these, an error message will display when you compile your project.

Alarm Tag

The name of the alarm tag. The name needs to be unique to the cluster and adhere to Tag Name Syntax rules.

If your project includes a large number of tags, a naming convention can be helpful when searching and debugging tags (see Structured Tag Names).

Alarm Name

A meaningful description of the alarm, for example, a name that includes the physical device associated with the alarm. The name is used when details of the alarm are displayed on the screen or logged to a device. This field does not support variable data.

Cluster Name

The name of the cluster that runs the alarm. This field needs to be defined if your project has more than one cluster.

You can leave this field blank in a multi-cluster system if cluster replication is enabled (see the parameter [General]ClusterReplication).

Category

The alarm category to which the alarm is assigned, defined as either a category number or a label (see Categorize Alarms).

If not specified, the category defaults to category 0.

Alarm Desc

A meaningful description of the alarm condition. This description is used when details of the alarm are displayed on screen or logged to a device.

This field can support variable data (by enclosing an expression in braces). For example:

"Line Broken Alarm at Line Speed {LineSpeed1}"

See Add Variable Data to Alarm Messages.

On function

(254 chars)

A Cicode function that is executed when the Multi-Digital Alarm becomes active, for example:

ON Function is STOP_PROCESS = 1;

In this example the digital variable STOP_PROCESS is set to ON when the alarm is triggered.

Note: Do not put a blocking Cicode function in this field. The alarm system executes ON or OFF actions within the polling loop. A blocking function will affect the polling of alarms, and may result in slow or delayed alarm processing.

A special case of this command occurs when the Alarm ON Function is self-referring, for example:

TAG1 = TAG1 + 1.

This command will not work properly since tags are not read again before processing the Alarm On function (for performance reasons). Therefore this particular command will initially set the value of TAG1 to 1 rather than incrementing it.

To correctly run a command of this type in the Alarm ON Function, use TaskNew() to run your own Cicode function to perform the tag command:

ON function is TaskNew("MyFunc","Data",5);

OFF function

(254 chars)

A Cicode function that is executed when a Multi-Digital Alarm becomes inactive. For example:

OFF Function is ENABLE_PROCESS = 1;

In this example the digital variable ENABLE_PROCESS is set to ON when an alarm in this category is reset.

Note: Do not put a blocking Cicode function in this field. The alarm system executes ON or OFF actions within the polling loop. A blocking function will affect the polling of alarms, and may result in slow or delayed alarm processing.

Help

The name of the graphics page that displays when the AlarmHelp() function is called by a user-defined command. If not specified, no action occurs when the AlarmHelp() function is called.

Comment

Any useful comment.

Variable Tag A

Variable Tag B

Variable Tag C

The three digital variables used to define eight states. Each state represents a different combination of tag values for these three variables.

States and Descriptions

The following eight states represent any possible tag value combinations. The variable tags are presented in the order tag C, tag B, tag A.

• State 000 - all 3 tags are false.
• State 00A - tags C and B are false, tag A is true.
• State 0B0 - tags C and A are false, tag B is true.
• State 0BA - tag C is false, tags B and A are true.
• State C00 - tag C is true, and tags B and A are false.
• State C0A - tags C and A are true, tag B is false.
• State CB0 - tags C and B are true, tag A is false.
• State CBA - all 3 tags are true.

For each state, there are two fields you can configure.

In the first field enter a description (for example, "Healthy" or "Stopped") with a maximum of eight characters.

In the second field, indicate whether the state will trigger an alarm. A value of 1 indicates an alarm state, and a 0 indicates no alarm will be triggered.

Suppression

The number of the Suppression Group to which the alarm belongs.

Integer value between 0–32767.

Alarms in the same group display the same value in this field. Use in conjunction with Suppression Level.

Note: To assign a name to a Suppression Group, define the name as a label with an integer value.

Level

The level of an alarm within its Suppression Group (integer value). This is a value between 0 and 255, where a lower level represents a higher priority.

This property enables an active alarm which is in an ON state (irrespective of whether it is acknowledged or not) to suppress lower priority alarms within the same Suppression Group. When this occurs, only the higher priority (lower level) alarms are displayed. Alarms with lower priorities (higher levels) will only activate and display when the higher priority (lower level) alarms become inactive.

Custom 1 to Custom 8

A user-defined string for filtering active alarms (maximum 64 characters).

Used in a custom Cicode query function as search criteria, the custom alarm filter enables operators to identify and display a subset of active alarms.

Note:

• Custom filters are visible only when the MultiDigital Alarm form is open in Extended mode.
• The fields are not case-sensitive and can contain 'A'..'Z', 'a'..'z', '0'..'9', and the underscore '_'.
• A custom filter cannot start with a digit.

Paging

A read/write property that indicates whether the alarm will be paged. When the value is 1 (TRUE) the alarm will be paged. The default value is 0 (FALSE). This property can be read using alarm tag browsing and read or modified when tag properties are enabled using the tag name "myCluster.myAlarm.paging".

Paging Group

A read only text string that indicates the paging group to which the alarm belongs. Maximum length is 80 characters. See your third-party paging system documentation for information on how to use this Paging Group string. This property can be read using alarm tag browsing or when tag properties are enabled read using the tagname "myCluster.myAlarm.paginggroup". For example, assign the value of PagingGroup to a variable:

myString = myCluster.Alarm_1.paginggroup

Area

The Area to which the alarm belongs. If an operator does not have access to an area, the alarm is not visible on the alarm display. For example, if you enter Area 1 here, operator need to have access to Area 1 (plus any necessary privileges) to acknowledge or disable this alarm.

The area and privilege fields defined here needs to be designed to work in conjunction. A privilege defined on a button (say) will ignore the alarm defined area.

Privilege

Privilege necessary by an operator to acknowledge or disable the alarm.

If you assign an acknowledgment privilege to an alarm, you should also check the privilege that is assigned to the command(s) that acknowledge the alarm. If you assign a different privilege to the commands, an operator needs to have both privileges to acknowledge the command. More importantly, the area defined here may be ignored.

Historize

This field enables you to automatically historize and publish the specified multi-digital alarm in CitectHistorian.

If you set this field to "TRUE", the variable will be included in an automated configuration process within the Historian environment. If you set the field to "FALSE" (or leave it blank), the variable will not be included.

See Integration with Historian.

Project

The project in which the alarm is configured.