Re: [foxboro] Historical Alarms

  • From: "Patrick Gosselin, CTech" <patrick.gosselin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "foxboro@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <foxboro@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 10:55:48 -0500

Jason


Say Hi to Alfred Aguilar for me...





I have installed several Alarm Shelving Tools at my sites here in Sudbury.



It works very well and the Operators are very pleased with the application.



If you have not used a priority distribution for the configured alarms on your 
system, you will want to put a list of exceptions together in order to ensure 
your critical alarms are not shelvable.



The tool is fully configurable, you can define the Alarm Max Shelf time, and a 
default. The Operator may choose to shelve the alarm for only 1 hour if they so 
wishe.



The general rule with the customes here has been a maximum shelf time of 12 
hours and a default shelf time of 8 hours.



The latest version of the tool allows you to shelve an alarm from a process 
graphic from the context menu and not just from the CAD.



There is also a Shelved Alarm GUI which shows you what alarms are currently 
shelved, allows you to unshelve an alarm, and the alarm expiration date.

Regards,
Patrick Gosselin, CTech
Senior System Service Representative
Invensys Systems Canada Inc.
1349-2 Kelly Lake Road
Sudbury, Ontario
P3E 5P5 Canada
T ? (705) 523-1331
F ? (705) 523-1881
C ? (705) 690-1642
E ? Patrick.Gosselin@xxxxxxxxxxxx

iom.invensys.com
________________________________________
From: foxboro-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [foxboro-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of 
SLADE Jason -NANTICOKE [jason.slade@xxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, December 20, 2011 10:37 AM
To: foxboro@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [foxboro] Historical Alarms

Jack,

Having only read about Foxboro's Alarm Shelving Tool - PSS 21S-2B12 B4 (but 
never having used it) is sounds like it would be useful to many Foxboro I/A 
users to help control the annoying / recurrent alarms during 
start-up/shutdown/outage.

Without it, all too often we see certain DCS blocks put into manual or alarms 
inhibited via the backdoor in CAD (argh).  This tool looks like it could be one 
of key elements in implementing ISA 18.2 (Alarm Management) on a Foxboro DCS in 
any industry and controlling alarm floods, chattering, etc.  A managed system 
would also negate the need for the backdoor approach.

Does anyone on the list have practical experience with it that they could share?

Jason Slade

Control Technologist
Protection & Control Systems Support
Nanticoke G.S.

-----Original Message-----
From: foxboro-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:foxboro-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of Easley, Jack
Sent: December 19, 2011 9:29 AM
To: foxboro@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [foxboro] Historical Alarms

Russ,

We have an ongoing issue here with most our Alarm History displays not 
functioning due to "Too Many Historical Alarms". We have a value of 40,000 in 
wp_am.cfg. I have tried to get TAC to help me with these issues several times 
in the past and they have never mentioned this wp_am.cfg configuration. We 
would prefer to keep this value at more than 5,000, but if you think this 
40,000 value could be causing our Alarm History display failures, I'm game to 
lowering this value. I've posted this on the list before, but got no response, 
just wondering if most people have the default 5,000 value in wp_am.cfg.

I know I have to initialize all of these AIM Historians to clear the problem 
with "Too many alarms" for the Alarm History Display, before it will function 
again. We have already reduced our AIM History alarm retention by deleting them 
every three weeks (in an attempt to fix this problem). We do get massive 
amounts of alarms in a 24 hour period during shutdown/startup scenerios.

Jack Easley
Sr. I&C Technician
Luminant Power, Martin Lake Plant
Phone 903.836.6290
jack.easley@xxxxxxxxxxxx

-----Original Message-----
From: foxboro-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:foxboro-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of Boulay, Russ
Sent: Sunday, December 18, 2011 5:02 PM
To: foxboro@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [foxboro] Historical Alarms

Also...remember 5000 is the default.....maxinmum is 40000....as edited in the 
wp_am.cfg file...

While you can have an issue trying to retrieve too many historized alarms thru 
the CAD,....those are the configurable options.


-----Original Message-----
From: foxboro-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:foxboro-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of Francisco Hernandez
Sent: Sunday, December 18, 2011 6:36 AM
To: foxboro@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [foxboro] Historical Alarms

Thanks a lot TIM!

-----Mensaje original-----
De: foxboro-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:foxboro-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] En 
nombre de Lowell, Timothy Enviado el: sábado, 17 de diciembre de 2011 11:30 a.m.
Para: foxboro@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Asunto: Re: [foxboro] Historical Alarms

Francisco,

You have four options to get the rest of the alarms out of AIM*:

1. Use histspy. This utility is in d:/opt/aim/bin. It is very non-intuitive and 
hard to use, and the output is difficult to read, but if you can figure out how 
it works, it will generate alarm data. I believe there is a tutorial on the 
Invensys site or the Cassandra site somewhere, but I'm not sure where.

2. Write some Excel VBA code. AIM* comes with one ODBC license. You need to 
configure that, and then on some off-platform PC that is connected to your I/A 
system by the third/fourth Ethernet port, you need to configure an ODBC 
connection. Excel Visual Basic for Applications has built-in ODBC calls that 
can be programmed to retrieve data from the AIM*Historian. I have done this, 
but not recently, and I don't have access to the code. There is some sample 
code in the Appendices of the AIM*Historian Administrators Guide, I believe.

3. Buy some more software. Invensys sells some data extraction products for 
AIM*. PAS in Houston, Matrikon (now part of Honeywell), TiPS, Inc, LimeWare 
from Brazil and many other third party vendors will sell you software to manage 
your alarms. Most of these will require you to purchase an AIM*OPC server 
license from Invensys (or a third party OPC server) with the appropriate server 
hardware as well the vendor's software and appropriate server hardware to run 
that. Obviously, this option is for when you have a plant or company alarm 
management philosophy in place and you have enough funding to implement it 
correctly.

4. Contact some of the folks on this list who have built their own alarm 
management solutions. I've seen several on here that run small applications to 
send their alarms to various open-source SQL databases. You can search the 
archives at //www.freelists.org/archive/foxboro.

We've been complaining to Invensys forever about the inability to extract data 
from AIM*. Invensys has chosen to discontinue development of AIM* and focus on 
Wonderware InSQL as the historian of the future, but from what I've heard, 
InSQL does not historize alarm data from the Foxboro I/A system either. For 
that, you still need AIM* (or a third-party).

Thanks,
Tim
________________________________________
From: foxboro-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [foxboro-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of 
Francisco Hernandez [francisco.27.hernandez@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Saturday, December 17, 2011 9:04 AM
To: foxboro@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [foxboro] Historical Alarms

Hi Everyone,


The Aim Historian Message Collector is configured in a P90 Host v8.6, so the 
Process Alarms are been historicized. If I wish see the historian alarm I open 
the Alarm History (AHD) in the Alarm Manager (CAD) Window. But it only show the 
last 5000 Alarms. Actually the AIM Historian is Historicizing the last 3 month 
of messages (Process Alarmas), Somebody know How Can I to view the whole 
historian alarms, not only the last 5000?



Thanks!







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notify the sender immediately by reply e-mail and then delete this message from 
your system. Please do not copy it or use it for any purposes, or disclose its 
contents to any other person. This email comes from a division of the Invensys 
Group, owned by Invensys plc, which is a company registered in England and 
Wales with its registered office at 3rd Floor, 40 Grosvenor Place, London, SW1X 
7AW (Registered number 166023). For a list of European legal entities within 
the Invensys Group, please go to http://www.invensys.com/en/legal/default.aspx.

You may contact Invensys plc on +44 (0)20 3155 1200 or e-mail 
reception@xxxxxxxxxxxxx This e-mail and any attachments thereto may be subject 
to the terms of any agreements between Invensys (and/or its subsidiaries and 
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Systems (formerly The Foxboro Company). Use the info you obtain here at
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