Design and Simulation of Fault Detection and Alarm Management in an Automated Production Line Using a Siemens PLC Training Kit

Unplanned stops caused by undetected faults and overloaded operators are a major cost in automated production. This paper presents a fault detection and alarm management function for an automated production line designed for a Siemens PLC training kit and evaluated by simulation. Typical faults such as sensor failure, actuator timeout, jam and emergency stop are detected by supervision logic and presented as prioritized, acknowledgeable alarms with first-out indication. Detection times and alarm behavior are evaluated. In simulation all 2000 inserted faults were detected within the programmed delay plus about 23 ms, and the filtering reduced false alarms from 158 to 2 in an 8 h normal run.