Muon Drift Chambers Read Out Electronics Monitoring project - Alarm Handling Expert Panel

This is a panel to configure and handle all alarms come from the MDT read out electronics. The ELTX DCS project has to monitor the values come from the front end electronics and the number of these values is in the order of 50000. Between this very big nnumber of sensors it is very likely that some of them do not work properly or they are completely damaged. The Alarm Handling Expert panel is made to handle the alarms that may appear and leave a clear and meaningfull alarm screen for the shifter (a very difficult task as it is appeared to be).

On the left of the panel there are the "display options" . The user can choose the chambers to be desplayed and taken actions to them after. The button "Display ALL MDT" displays all MDT chambers. The button "Display Disabled" displays the chamber that has one or more disabled alarms connected with the temperature , Analog voltages , Digital voltages. The button "CSM / 2.5V disabled" displays the chambers that have deactivated the alarm for the flag of csm state or the flag of csm 2.5V ref value state (Both these flags should not propagate alarms in order to be sure that the data we take are trustfull). The button "Display (Alarmed) && (Disabled") displays the chambers that have an alarm in the temperature or digital or analog voltages and this alarm is active. Finally the user can enter his/her own chamber name in the text field, and comntinue with furhter actions.

On the right side of the panel there are the "actions". The user can have a set of different actions.

The first button "Set Chambers Comments" is used in order to set the comments for the alarm screen of all the alarms used in project. The second button "Set Mezz V dpFuncs" is used in order to set the dp functions that connect the real datapoints of analog and digital Mezz voltage to the "Voltage Deviation" datapoints - the datapoints that are used to carry the information of the alarms of the analog and digital voltages. These buttons should be pressed only once in the beggining of the project. Then this information is kept with the normal project export.

Below another button "Configure Chambers Alarm" is used for the configuration of the alarms of the chosen chambers. This action, sets the alarm limits and the alarm classes of all the alarms used in the project. Then another button "Set Chambers Mask" connects the project with the configuration DB and takes the information of the mezzanine masks that are used in each chamber and activates the correspodent alarms. This update of information is done anyway internally in the project every 12 hours.

Besides , there are three buttons that have to do with the activation and deactivation of the chambers alarm. The first one "Activate Chambers Alarm" is used in order to activate all the alarms of a chamber. In contrary the "Deactivate All Alarms" is used to deactivate all chambers alarms. Finally there is the "Deactivate Deviation Alarm" that is used to deactivate only the special alarms for the analog and digital voltages created for the needs of the project.

There are actions also that have to do with future maintenance of the project. So the "Set New Alarm Limits" button , checks the alarm limits given on the axis on the right and make the new alarm limits (This can be done even while FSM is running - this action does not stops FSM). And there is a similar button "Set New Deviation Alarm Limits" that sets the new alarm limits for the special deviation alarms.

On the botton part of the panel there is the alarm handling of the details of the chamber. There is a schema of the mezzanine cards and the temperature , analog Voltage and digital Voltage per mezzanine. If a chamber is inseted in the chamber name box, the user can have several display options. The button "Display Sensors (Alarmed) && (Displayed)" is used in case the shifter wants to see the marked the mezzanine sensors that are alarmed and not disabled. For example, by pressing this button for the chamber BIS1A02 the analog and digital Voltage of the second mezzanine of the chamber are ticked. This means that the these values are not the propriate ones (around 3,3Volts) and propagate an alarm. Moreover these alarms are not a known issue because they are not disabled.

In contrary to the previous action, there is another button that ticks a sensor that is alarmed or has been deactivated. This button is the "Display Sensors (Alarmed) || (Disabled)". Finally there is a button to display only the sensors that are disabled , the "Disaply Sensors Disabled" button.

The last button of this column is called "Update Sensors Disability" and is the most important one. In case the user knows a sensor is not behaving properly (usually after discution with the detector experts) , can deactivate the alarm in order not to propagate this information in the alarm screen. By just ticking the correspodent bad sensors and pressin the "Update Sensors Disability" button, the alarms are disabled and removed from the alarm screen. The user in future can check the chambers that have deactivated alarms by pressing the button "Display Disabled" explained above.

The very bottom of this panel deals with the CSM flags. There are 2 such flags, the "csm flag" and the "csm 2.5 V ref" flag. If any is raised, the electronics data we take from this chamber should not be trusted. By pressin the button "Tick if Flags have Bad Value" the user is informed (in the tickboxes below) if any of these flags is raised. Moreover, the user has the ability to activate - deactivate the correspodent alarms for these flags by using the buttons on the right.

-- CharilaosTsarouchas - 20 Oct 2008