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.
