In addition to creating alarm areas by production line (physical divisions), it is a good idea to create functional alarm areas. Typically, this is done when attributes of your process hardware are critical to the manufacture of a product. These attributes can be anything, such as the temperature of an oven or the speed of a mixer. For example, suppose you want to generate an alarm whenever the speed of the mixers in your production lines fall below 500 rotations per minute (RPM). One way to do this is to create a functional alarm area called MIXERS and assign this area to the blocks that monitor each mixer, as the following figure shows. Then, enable the Alarm Summary Service to report alarms from these blocks.
Functional Alarm Areas
