Jam on the line!!

Logix 500 question
Hello, I am a newbie on here so please be gentle!!
I have been given a project to detect product jams on a conveyor system.
The conveyor already has 5 pec's on it to operate brakes as the line fills up. The brakes then open in sequence to release product to the next machine downstream. The logic would be that if any downstream pec is false ( no product) and an upstream one is true then an alarm would be activated.
I could do it with n/o n/c contacts but with 32 possibilities I need a neater version.
any ideas would be most helpful
regards
Jo

My advice is that if you are new to PLC, DO NOT try to be clever; do it in whatever long but straight-forward form first and test it. Once you do that, we can suggest a few ways to shrink the code down.

Imagine looking at PEC5. Now state the logic using this as a starting point.

If this PEC is ON then you don't need to worry about it.

But if it is OFF then what other conditions would trigger an alarm?

"If PEC 5 is OFF AND ..... then alarm" What goes in the '.....'?

Thank you for the support guys, I had thought about using the inputs to generate a binary number, so I had a cup of tea and drawing up a truth table there are only 6 outcomes that are favourable (not jammed) which makes it a whole lot easier.