Dear All

In a muti unit configuration of two Fr6B GTs with Mark-VI and Cimplicity HMI, it has been observed that some alarms and events are getting interchanged ie, event of a given unit is getting displayed with a tag of the other unit.

Even after rebuilding the entire configuration and downloading problem reappeared.

Kindly help.

 

When did this problem start?

Contrary to popular myth, it is not good to rebuild and download to solve every problem--and can even cause more problems than it solves. Signal naming in Mark VI is dynamic and signal names can be arbitrarily re-assigned to memory locations during rebuilds, and that can cause lots of problems if the entire process of rebuilding and downloading is not followed very closely--and that includes getting the new signals/memory locations loaded into TCI and CIMPLICITY. And, the process is not documented very well by GE, if at all. It changes depending on the version of TCI and CIMPLICITY and service packs and Toolbox and ControlST. It's really not a very well thought-out process, but worse, it's not very well documented--anywhere.

Alarms are handled by TCI and passed to a special alarm "object" in CIMPLICITY. It's one of the things that makes GE Mark* HMIs so frustrating to most people, and especially those that know CIMPLICITY fairly well. Some things are done by CIMPLICITY, and some are not. It can be very frustrating. Because some of the information gets passed from TCI to CIMPLICITY and then displayed, it's likely NOT caused by the Mark VI panels. They just broadcast their alarms onto the UDH, and then TCI picks them up and passes them to the CIMPLICITY alarm object.

When was the last time you re-booted the HMIs? This causes the new rebuilt configurations to be loaded into RAM (you can do the same thing by stopping the CIMPLICITY project, and stopping TCI, then re-starting TCI, waiting a couple of minutes, and then re-starting CIMPLICITY).

I think there was a command-line utility called ALMDUMP1 or ALMDUMP2 or something similar which can be used to view active alarms from Mark VI panels. This would probably be useful in determining if the signals coming from the Mark VIs are not working correctly (though that's not likely because most problems like this are not caused by messages being sent by the Mark VIs).

 

Thnx for the reply... actually the problem started from the day when multi-unit configuration was done in this site.

After doing the exercise of re-building, the problem appeared to get resolved as no mix up was observed for few days of operation. But the problem has recurred again. Both the Mark-VI are dumping alarms correctly with their corresponding tag. Any thing that we can carry out to solve this problem??

Thnx again.