OPC AE for the best of alarm handling
How should the captain of a ship decide to trigger an evacuation? How should a driller onboard an offshore vessel decide to pull-out and immediately disconnect from the well? How should a control room lead operator re-evaluate his initial risk assessment and prepare for a corrective action? EATOPS' Alarms & Events plug-in means a lot to operators. This OPC AE strict implementation considerably improves the judgment of an operator. The RIVOPS console benefits from this extra comfort. It gives the presentation layer of the control room a cleaner overview thus an increased awareness of the system being monitored.
The OPC AE standard is fully compliant with ISA 18.2 which promotes the use of process alarm messages and alarm attributes for the operator. An good example of that is the RIVOPS' 3D SCADA approach which naturally drives the operator attention over the areas of a process when the needed thresholds are met such as during an event detection, or an abnormal scenario detection with its pieces of equipment’s safety limits. The RIVOPS alarm-banner is mostly suited to identify the location of faulty equipment, or create awareness on the time to response before a corrective action should be taken. The operator's understanding of the severity of a scenario is improved through a colour-coded interface which is directly inherited from the OPC AE Server attributes. Instead of making its own interpretation of the severity, the HMI is brought back to its slave position receiving its information messages directly from the alarm server. This is very positive in the sense that the alarm server is now entitled to fully play is role of server dispatching a unique message to the family of HMI displays found in the control room.
Another advantage is that the operators' acknowledgment messages are aggregated inside the alarm server & directly transmitted to the PLC where the process logic is running. Unlike too many HMI packages, this alarm information is not stored inside the HMI Runtime.
Such a software architecture avoids a lots of inconsistencies in the control system. It pushes the artificial intelligence capabilities to another level. For more information on the RIVOPS overview panel, please visit our technology section.