Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Not To Alarm You, But Here's How to Generate An Audit Report

Alarm Management is a big focus of DeltaV version 13, helping our customers become compliant with ISA 18.2, which provides a roadmap for compliance across all stages of alarms, from identification to implementation and management of change.


One of the tools we’ve included in V13 is an Alarm Audit Reporting tool, allowing you to compare alarms as they are currently set online in the controllers to how those alarms are configured in the DeltaV database.

Accessing the tool first requires you to launch the System Alarm Management application from the DeltaV Explorer toolbar:


I’ll have to come back to the System Alarm Management application in a future post.  For now, once the app appears, click on the left most toolbar button or File, then Manage Alarm Reports…


The Alarm Reports interface looks like this:


So let’s create a differences report for the entire system – click on the green + button.  I’ll give the report a name, accept the default location and select Difference Report before I hit OK:


The next dialog box allows you to select the types of alarms to include and some filtering.  I’ll pick only Enabled Alarms, Process Alarms and All Functional Classifications:


The next dialog is where you get to add specific locations to the report.  You can specify areas, nodes, logic solvers, units, or even specific modules.  The All check box allows you to pick all of any of the above categories (except modules).  Since this is a system-wide differences report, I’ll check the All box for Areas:


Finally, you’ll get to the Schedule Task dialog – you’ll see it’s not yet scheduled, but using the drop down under Schedule Task, you can select the desired frequency – Once, Daily, Weekly, or Monthly.  Now you don’t have to schedule a report – you can leave it as Not Scheduled and you’ll be able to run it on demand from the Manage Alarm Reports view.  For this example, I’m going to leave the report as Not Scheduled:


Now here’s an important safety tip – if you hit cancel on any of these dialog boxes, it’s going to take you all the way back to the Manage Alarm Reports view L - just be careful. 

After hitting OK from above, your report will show up in the first row of the Manage Alarm Reports view.  I’ll go ahead and select it to show you how the other toolbar buttons highlight.  You can also get some of the choices by right clicking on the report:


Select Run from the menu, and wait until the Last Result column shows Completed:


Now use the View report button on the toolbar or the right click selection to see the results:


So out of 84 process alarms, I’ve got one difference between the controller and the database – my high alarm on LIC101 is configured for 90, but the online value is 95.

Both an XML and HTM file are generated when you run a report, so it’s highly portable.  And you don’t have to be inside the Alarm Report application to generate reports.  There’s a command line executable in the DeltaV/bin directory named SAMAlarmReports.exe – there’s a full explanation of how to use the executable in the help file associated with Alarm reports.

So a great use example would be to automatically generate a differences report as part of your plant’s shift turnover procedure – using, of course, DeltaV Logbooks.  Another use would be to generate a runtime report for a specific unit or units at the beginning or end of a batch.