A Model-Driven Alarms Framework (MAF) With Mobile Clients Support for Wide-Ranging Industrial Control Systems

An efficient and robust alarms management is an extremely desirable feature to prevent critical failures in modern Industrial Control Systems. Generally, alarm systems are categorized into two major components; i.e., Alarm Server and Alarm Client. Alarm server is responsible to process alarms on real time values, while alarm clients display the generated alarms. With the advent of modern technologies, like, Internet of Thing (IoT), the need for mobile alarm clients has significantly been increased, as alarms need to be displayed on different gadgets instead of traditional big screens. Owing to significance of alarms in the industry, several state-of-the-art approaches have been introduced, suggesting various improvements. However, such approaches are only meant for specific industry and cannot be applied across-the-board. Furthermore, full support for mobile clients is not available. On the other hand, certain industrial software products like, SIMATIC WinCC, Genesis64 provide complete alarm solution including mobile client features, as well. However, such solutions are proprietary with higher costs, i.e., pay per tag model. Considering such limitations, this article proposes a novel Model-driven Alarms Framework (MAF) with mobile clients (Android and iOS) support. Particularly, MAF comprises an Alarm Profile for Industrial Control Systems (APICS) for the modeling of server, mobile clients and configuration requirements of alarms with remarkable simplicity. Furthermore, a complete open source Alarms Profile Transformation Engine (APTE) has been implemented to automatically generate alarm server (Kotlin), native Android (Kotlin) and iOS (Swift) alarm clients from APICS-compliant models. The feasibility of proposed framework is demonstrated through two case studies (flour mill and home automation). The results prove that MAF not only provides complete alarm server solution to generate bulk of alarms simultaneously, but also supports android and iOS alarm clients for efficient visualization. Besides that, MAF is easy to use, cost-effective and can be applied in wide-ranging industrial applications.