The alarms handler takes care of routing alarms to the required destinations. Typically these may include:

• The long-term historian. Alarms may need to be stored for several years to provide audit trails. These can be used to analyse operational incidents and for regulatory purposes.
• Alarm pager systems. These are often found on sites where staff levels are low e.g. during the night and at weekends. At these times an operator may need to be notified of alarms when they are away from operator workstations.
• Alarm files and printers.

The alarm handler keeps a track of the number of standing alarms for each process area. This information can be used to direct the operator to areas of the plant that are causing problems. As indicated above the alarm handler is fully integrated with the long-term historian so all alarms, events, operator actions etc. can be logged to the long-term historian. AQBi™ provides the necessary thin client functionality to retrieve alarms and events logged by the alarm handler.