Alarm Philosophy and setup within Desigo CC

Hi All, 
I'm after some advice and guidance please?

I am looking to create an alarm philosophy document for our site (large campus of around 100 buildings), as currently the many alarms on the system are very hard to prioritise and manage.

As we're moving from Desigo Insight to  Desigo CC (V3 currently, but will be V4.2) now is a good time to rationalize.

I'd like to know if anybody has produced such a document that set out how alarms are categorised and managed please, and provide a sample of the information collected if possible please?

My thought at the moment are that I would like to configure the event lamps within CC to have the following labels;

1. Life Safety

2. Multiple Buildings (Critical faults from an energy centre)

3. Critical Plant (Comms rooms, Generator faults)

4. Building (Critical fault from a building)

5. Floor (Ventilation serving a floor)

6. Room (FCU within a room)

7. Non Critical Plant (Rain water harvesting)

8. Equipment (Energy Meters etc)

With the idea being that alarms are categorised by the severity of the impact that we will cause (1. Highest - 8. lowest, and the areas that will be impacted too.

I would welcome comments or thoughts about this please.

The follow on question to this is how to implement it within Desigo CC, from what I can see there are a number of options.

1. As a PXC controller has 6 levels of Notification Blocks within the controller as standard, we would need to add more notification objects and then reconfigure the priorities as required to achieve the 8 (or more if we choose) levels

2. Configure all of the alarming on a point by point basis directly within Desigo CC, allocating it to the relevant Event priority.

Are there any other approaches that could be taken / has something not been considered?

If those are the best two approaches, what are the pros / cons of each please?

Thank you in advance

Chris

Hi,

Interesting project and thoughts it seems, I am not any kind of alrm and event expert.

But have you read the dcoumentation about events and alarming in Desigo and BACnet? 

Those lamps are meant to show the severity of the alarm not to divide alarms in a building hierarchy.

What is normal is to have fire and those things that could impact peoples health severly (gas leaks etc) on lifesafety, alarms that could have a severe impact on the equipment on the next level and so on until the lowest priority that is information event.

Reading your post it sounds like you would be better of to use scripting and make a graphical overview on how many active events there is in each segment you listed instead.

Or setup a report template that can generate the info you seek.

Best regards Ronnie

Hi Ronnie, 

Thank you for your reply, and apologies for my late one!

I have read a lot of the Desigo CC documentation around alarming, which documentation are you thinking of?

In the time since posting this, I have answered one of my questions, in that, I don't think it would be a good idea to try and setup new notification blocks within the controllers to separate out the alarms, as this would then require going to every single point that is required to be an alarm, and through Xworks changing the parameter for whether the notification block are preassigned (default) to user defined, as this appears to not be possible via BACnet. Once this is set it is then possible to specify the notification settings. The sheer amount of work involved in this makes it a non starter.

"What is normal is to have fire and those things that could impact peoples health severly (gas leaks etc) on lifesafety, alarms that could have a severe impact on the equipment on the next level and so on until the lowest priority that is information event."

That is my intention, and the lower levels will reflect the impact caused by that alarm, and the impact is then determined by physical area affected.

Like you say though, it is interesting, and many different people have many different views, and I guess there is no one approach that fits all use cases. As a large campus where our Desigo system only really operates comfort equipment, for me, knowing if people are about to become uncomfortable, and my phone is going to ring off the hook is a priority so that we can take preventative measures quickly!

Thanks,

Chris

Hi CJ,

That's really useful, thank you!

Chris

Hi CJ,

I've just been working through your guide, I have reached the point of applying my custom schema, however that button is greyed out. Hovering over the button does have a line that says this is disabled for slave systems.

As the system that I am working on is part of a distribution, would it mean having to remove it from the distro, then applying the schema? I have tried logging in to that sever directly, however it is still disabled.

I appreciate that all servers within the distro will need to have the same scheme applied. Is there a simple way to copy schemas between systems (V3)

Thanks,

Chris