Maintaining a complete list of alarms on both the PLC and HMI can be tedious and inaccurate to such an extent that when it’s time to crunch, alarms get missed that really should be created in code and added to the HMI. This difficulty can cause “ghost” faults in the system, and this software tool helps reduce the effort to create and maintain alarm lists and improve the accuracy and completeness of those alarm lists.
Of the machine building projects I worked on with this tool that I wrote, often 3,000 to 15,000 alarms would be created. This allows maintenance personnel to get extremely detailed information on exact problems with the numerous temperature controlled heat zones and motors on the projects.
The tool also makes it easy to classify alarm messages and provides a list of filters so that alarm lists on the screens don’t get cluttered with warnings when there are far more critical faults active.
To use the tool, simply export the tag list from Allen Bradley Logix 5000 / Studio 5000 to a CSV file, open the file with the tool to get an XML file, which can then be imported into Allen Bradley FactoryTalk View Studio Machine Edition.