Alarm Management

The CODESYS Visualization add-on provides all the technical capabilities you need to implement a comprehensive alarm and notification system for your application. The visualization users should get specific information about the current state of the running application. They should be alerted in the event of critical states and faults. The alarms are typed, prioritized, and clearly displayed according to their alarm state. The visualization user is responsible for the task of acknowledging the alarms and initiating countermeasures. It is possible to archive triggered alarms.

As an application developer, you will get support when creating an alarm management system. The Alarm Configuration object is at the top. Below these are the alarm classes, where the basic properties such as priority, acknowledgement method, notification actions, and display options are defined.

The objects of the alarm groups are also included. Alarm definitions for similar alarms are listed together in an alarm group. In addition, the handling of alarms with regard to deactivation, archiving, and the display of alarm instances is specified and, in particular, the alarm definitions are defined.

An alarm is defined by a unique ID and a detailed observation type (IEC expression with the project or application variable to be observed). Moreover, it is based on an alarm class. The message to be displayed can also be supplemented with information from latch variables. The behavior of the alarm can be influenced by an on-delay time and off-delay time. By assigning a higher-priority alarm, the alarm can be acknowledged at the same time as a higher-priority alarm. As a result, the acknowledgement of alarms can be issued in a structured way.

A text list with the same name is assigned to the alarm group. This contains the alarm messages and notifications and these can be localized here.

The AlarmManager library is available for programmatic handling of the configured alarms in the application.

If you use library POUs, then these can be monitored with alarm definitions. To do this, you can generate alarm instances.

You can use the Alarm Table and Alarm Banner visualization elements to visualize your alarm management. The visualization user will be notified and alerted about the state of the system, and subsequent inputs and acknowledgements will be processed. The visualization user can react to alarm situations according to the defined emergency strategy. As an application developer, you set up the procedure in an alarm situation in the alarm configuration as an "acknowledgement method".

An alarm management which also includes remote devices (distributed alarms) is possible when an HMI device is connected in the network.