Iberdrola´s alarms management system [power network protection]

Iberdrola (Spain) has developed a corporate alarms management system (codename ALARMS) that acquires, in near real-time, the alarms, the events and messages produced by the 25 transmission and distribution control systems, stores them in several relational database servers and allows corporative access to them. ALARMS has a range of users, ranging from network operators to protections, maintenance, planning, control and communications engineers. Access is performed using a client/server system, with a number of facilities for searching, storage and printing. The development has been very cost-effective as it is based on standard products: the different operative systems used DOS, Unix and Windows are employed where appropriate, the communication protocol-all communications are TCP/IP based, the programming languages-C, PRO*C and Visual Basic, and finally a relational database server