Towards the Selection of Optimum Alarms System in Leading Industry Automation Software

Alarm is an intrusive alert to the human operator. It notifies the operator about the behavior of a controlled process. This notification, if presented with a meaningful message, enables the operator to take corrective measures in time successfully. The alarm systems are not confined to a limited genre of industries, instead they've become a necessity in almost every tertiary sector. The alarm systems are experiencing a deep interest by the researchers; however, the literature seems to be distant from the available industry automation software (IAS) deployed in the industries. The literature available, to the best of our knowledge, lack identification of state-of-the-art solution and the proposed approaches are complex and questionable to implement at a large scale. We have tried to bridge this gap between the academia and industrial sector by compiling a list of renowned IAS tools i.e. SIMATIC WinCC, Genesis64, GeniDAQ, Wonderware, LabView, and Open Automation Software and analyzing them in the context of alarm systems. It is concluded that Genesis64 alarms outperform others concerning supported alarm types and their compatibility with numerous databases with native mobile application support etc. but costs a fortune. SIMATIC WinCC is the only one providing cross-platform support i.e. Linux, Mac and Windows but it doesn't support remote monitoring via mobile application and lacks interoperability in terms of supporting alarm servers and databases and it is too heavy on pocket.