Exclusive Control and Alarm Summary

[Hardin4019]

Any suggestions on how to get Exclusive Control data into The Event Journal and Alarm Summary as an additional column on every entry in CAlarmSummary? Seems like this would be a fairly standard thing to include, but so far, it doesn't seem to be currently included. This could be a feature request for the future. 

IE: We are using Exclusive Control to assign an entire station and all alarms to a lead operator / engineer, so that the other operators are not impacted by the alarm "Flood" during commissioning / annual re-testing. I would like to see a column/field in the Alarm Summary state something like "ExclCtrlActive" if alarms being generated were under Exclusive Control at the time the alarm was generated. We would use this column/field for monthly alarm reporting and operator alarm count comparison purposes. IE, we had 5000 total alarms last month, 4900 alarms were seen and acknowledged by the operators, 100 alarms were only visible and acknowledged by the lead operator / engineer handling commissioning / re-testing of a station and were of no impact to the other operators.

Current ideas how to accommodate this:

1. Change the StateAreaOfInterest to a special AOI for testing when assigning Exclusive Control, and putting the AOI back to normal when the Exclusive Control is released. This seems like the least complicated, since AOI is already in both Event Journal and Alarm Summary and is recorded at the time of the event.
2. Getting the lead operator / engineer to use a particular Acknowledge With Comment response, relies heavily on the operator not making a mistake.
3. Configure "CustomStringField" to include something like "ExclCtrlActive: ExclCtrlUser" in both the Event Journal and Alarm Summary. Unsure how to accomplish this one.
4. Third party software to collect and compare events and alarms, or a rather complex SQL Query to determine if Exclusive Control was Active for each entry in the Alarm Summary.

[tfranklin · Accepted solution]

I think option 3 would be the most attractive, but the issue as you pointed out is that you have to set the property after the alarm is created.  To do this you'd use a method in CAlarmSummary called SetCustomStringField.  I suppose you could do this automagically using some redirections and ST logic.  I don't think it'd be difficult to do but I'm unsure how taxing something like that would be on the system given that it would be called for every alarm.  I'll defer to somebody smarter than me for that one. 

I personally don't like #1 but it is the least barrier to entry.  There's a lot of properties that have to change every time you'd do that and that could be fairly taxing on the system as it's a lot of configuration changes x number of times a day. 

I'd explore option 3 some more and test some redirections.