OT: OPC Alarms and Events

I am currently working on a project(not PLC based but Access Control) where I need to get data from an OPC Alarm and Event server into Excel, as I need to be able to configure the alarms and events to either auto accept or accept using the software supplying the OPC info.

There is plenty of DA middleware but has anyone come across any for OPC AE servers?

Cheers,

Jon.

I am prepared to get corrected here by the more knowledgeable...

I know that OPC AE has long been specified, but I don't know that vendors really use it. A quick Google search yeilded some Matrikon and this utility. In my experience HMI vendors use OPC servers for device communication, but usually concoct their own event and alarming systems.

Jon R said:

I am currently working on a project(not PLC based but Access Control) where I need to get data from an OPC Alarm and Event server into Excel, as I need to be able to configure the alarms and events to either auto accept or accept using the software supplying the OPC info.

There is plenty of DA middleware but has anyone come across any for OPC AE servers?

Cheers,

Jon.

Click to expand...

search for "AE server" in the products on the OPCfoundation.org site:

Softing seems to have a development package for developing AE:

http://www.opcfoundation.org/Products/ProductDetails.aspx?CM=1&RI=8307&CU=27

Softing's OPC Toolbox is a full suite of high quality toolkits for fast and easy development of OPC Server and Client applications in different programming languages for several operating systems.
The C++ AE Server Toolkit provides optimum support for implementing your personal OPC server, meeting the standards at the same time.

But that description doesn't read like a commercial server pkg, it reads 'development' tool.

Dan

A search for "A&E server" brought up a slightly different list, one of which I am familiar with, the Honeywell recorder A&E OPC server. That is a proprietary OPC server, an integral part of the recorder itself, not a typical OPC server run on a Windows box. Honeywell refers to this as OPC 3.0, compared to an earlier OPC server version 2.0 (that ran on a Windows box), that did not handle alarms via OPC.

Another entry, SMAR Research Corporation 's Alarms and Events OPC Server, describes itself as exclusively for Foundation Fieldbus devices.

Since alarms can take on various formats, time stamps, descriptions, priority levels, acknowledgement status, I'm surmising that there is no universal AE or A&E server, but that each is customized for the task at hand, and that there are toolkits to do so.

Dan