The Development of an Intelligent Reliable Database Driven Alarm System at the ISR

The monitoring of equipment and operating conditions of a complex installation is an important task for an accelerator control system, especially for a machine with high intensity circulating beams like the ISR. It is essential that the control system provides the relevant correct alarms and warnings whilst at the same time not flooding the operators with irrelevant information. At the ISR a system has been introduced which displays fault conditions as text messages on a colour display. In conjunction with these messages it is possible for the operator to obtain supplementary information concerning the fault or actions that should be taken. The operator also has facilities to cancel fault messages, to ignore them and to supervise the monitoring programs. The texts for the messages are kept on a database in order to facilitate their modification. All fault messages are printed and kept on a file for later extraction by an interrogation program. This allows for the easy analysis of fault situations or for the production of statistics.