Alarms Terms

What is the difference between the terms to enable or disable alarms, suppress or unsuppress alarms, shelve or unshelve alarms? Please help me newbie

Not for sure I understand what you are asking.

But I always allow the end user to be able to "Enable or Disable" their alarms. As an example: I monitor tank fluid levels and there might be a high level alarm and low level alarm so I would have a button next to the "High Level Alarm" that would toggle between "Enable/Disable".

But this is just how I do it. I'm sure other people have other ways.

The "difference" could simply be brand, or even just different translations.

I've never heard of "shelving" alarms, and if someone asked me to disable an alarm vs suppress an alarm, I'd assume they were asking the same thing.

To me, "suppressing" is usually done via logic and is based on condition while "disabling" is via human intervention.

Shelving is a common alarming term. Basically the alarm is disabled for a fixed amount of time. When the time expires, the alarm is automatically enabled again.

Don't recall ever using terms shelving and unshelving alarms, but others I have used.

Enable/Disable: Disabling alarm means that even if the alarm conditions are met, it will not be displayed as alarm in the system. Enabling means that the alarm will be displayed again.

Suppress/unsuppress: Suppressing alarm means that it will disappear from the system, even if it is still active. After defined time it will appear again, or when it gets active again. I think the shelving and unshelving might mean the same as suppressing/unsuppressing.

Disabling/Enabling is quite risky feature and there should be at least notification that there are alarms disabled visible at all times (and somewhere a list of them).

A lot of this depends on the PLC side of things. You can shelve an alarm all you want, but if the PLC is still looking at it then it's really pointless. Generally enable and disable are both PLC and HMI, which is a better way to do it.