When the parameter is set to 1, alarm summary state information is retained. In other words, when an alarm goes off, its entry in the alarm summary will retain its original state rather than change to 'OFF' state. For example, if an analog alarm is generated with state HIGH, the alarm summary will retain this state when the alarm goes off. This will also give the best historical view of alarm data for the Process Analyst.

When the parameter is set to 0, the original state for an alarm in alarm summary is lost when the alarm goes off. This will result in the alarm going to the 'OFF' state.

If you are a Plant2Business user, the default setting of [Alarm]SumStateFix=1 will affect your applications as Plant2Business uses Alarm Summary as the alarm interface. In particular, for the Report Client it uses SumState to determine whether the alarm is active on the report template. The report template of ALM_Standard.rpt has been modified using field OffDateTime to determine if an alarm is active. It will be included in a later release of Plant2Business (after version 3.10) . Moreover, if you use an upload alarms task to upload alarms into a SQL table, please be aware that field SumState will contain the different value. Therefore, you may have to modify your data requests when alarm data is presented or create a new table to accommodate the new alarm data. To have consistency, it is recommended that a new alarm data table is used.

Note: With this parameter on, the alarm event queue (enabled with [alarm]EvenetQue parameter) can receive an extra entry in the queue - when an alarm is unacknowledged on, and a second time for unacknowlwedged off conditions. This can be a problem when using the Citect Alarm Paging System as two SMS messages can be sent. Citect has confirmed this to be a problem in CitectHMI/SCADA version 6.00. We are researching this problem and will post new information here as it becomes available.