Alarm Parking

The Alarm Parking application allows a Controller to "park" an alarm for a user-defined amount of time.

In the Alarm Summary window, a parked alarm changes from a flashing, unacknowledged alarm to a non-flashing, acknowledged alarm. It remains parked until either the user-defined amount of time expires, or the point enters a new alarm state. When the user-defined amount of time expires, AVEVA Enterprise SCADA generates an event.

If the user-defined amount of time expires, and the alarm condition is still present, the application un-parks the alarm and changes it from a non-flashing, acknowledged alarm to a flashing, unacknowledged alarm.

Alarm parking applies only to telemetered database alarms – both persistent and non-persistent. System alarms are excluded.

While the parking and unparking of alarms increases and decreases the acknowledged and unacknowledged counts for a point, respectively, it has no effect on the point’s alarm count.

Note: Parking an alarm parks only a single, particular alarm associated with a point. The functionality has no effect on other alarms that may currently exist for the point.

The following fields in the indicated RealTime database (RTDB) tables are related to Alarm Parking:

• zzzTimer field in the Almsum table – timestamp indicating when the timer expires.

• zzzEnable field in the Almsum table – this field indicates whether or not an alarm is parked.

• maxalmpark field in the analog, status, rate, and multistate tables – the maximum allowable period of time (in seconds) that a Controller can park an alarm. The absolute maximum is 2,147,483,647 seconds (68 years).

When Controllers park alarms within their Area of Responsibility (AOR), they must select or enter a parking time in minutes, and indicate their reason for parking the alarm. The parking time must be less than the maximum parking time as configured by an Administrator.