Creating operator displays that report alarms from physical and functional alarm areas is helpful, but very often you want to create an overview picture so that operators can monitor your entire plant from one screen. Such pictures:
- Show each alarm area and display new (unacknowledged) alarms by animating an object in the picture. For example, your overview picture could color an object or change the color's visibility when a new alarm occurs.
- Let operators open a detailed picture of each area to determine the specific blocks that are in an alarm state. For example, the overview picture in the following figure shows an Alarm Summary object. When an alarm occurs, the operator can click the alarm in the Alarm Summary object and display a detailed picture of that alarm area.
You can create such overview pictures by adding an Alarm Summary object to your overview pictures and creating an alarm area for your entire production site. Once you create the site-wide alarm area, you can assign it to all your database blocks and alarm destinations. This ensures that iFIX reports all alarms to the overview picture. For example, assume the alarm areas for your production lines are named Line 1, Line 2, and Line 3 and the name of your site-wide alarm area is called Overview. Then you would assign alarm areas as the following table describes.
|
Enter the alarm area names... |
For blocks and alarm destinations in area... |
|
Line 1 and Overview |
Line 1 |
|
Line 2 and Overview |
Line 2 |
|
Line 3 and Overview |
Line 3 |
Once you assign the site-wide alarm area to the blocks in your database, you associate your detail pictures and the process database blocks by entering the picture's name in the associated block's Alarm Extension field. This step stores the file names of your detail pictures with their associated database blocks. For more information on the Alarm Extension fields, refer to the iFIX Database Reference.
Your final step in creating an overview picture is to write scripts that display your detail pictures when you double-click an alarm from the Alarm Summary object. For more information about writing scripts that work with the Alarm Summary object, refer to the Writing Scripts manual.
