Alarm Monitoring And Reporting Systems In A Distributed Control Environment

The paper analyzes how Alarm Monitoring and Reporting System relates to other functions and their physical implementation of I&C systems. A brief architectural review of conventional, centralized and distributed control systems, shows that Alarm Monitoring should be considered together with other I & C systems such as the basic automatic (main) control, the override control and the hardwired protection. This review reveals that the evolution of the basic automatic control brings about the development of the Alarm Monitoring and Reporting System into a sophisticated functional hierarchy called the Computer Aided Supervising Hierarchy. This paper shows that redundant remote stations and data networks may have a better availability than hardwired Alarm Monitoring System.