Plant areas overview

Plant areas are logical, software-based divisions of your control system, which may or may not correspond to physical areas in your plant. Plant areas contain the modules that make up the control strategy. You can have as many as 100 plant areas. How you define your plant areas affects your overall system security scheme because you can authorize access to the system based, in part, on plant areas.

The DeltaV system provides a default system area called AREA_A. You cannot delete AREA_A because it is essential for system operations and for performing certain DeltaV functions. If you decide to create additional plant areas, you may want to put your control modules in other areas and reserve AREA_A for only these system operations and functions. You can rename AREA_A to a more meaningful name for your process.

The name must be 16 characters or less, and may contain only alphanumeric characters, hyphens (-), and underscores (_). Hyphens or underscores are typically used to represent spaces between words.

Notes

In order for system-wide events (such as logins, logouts, and downloads) to be recorded or other operator activities (such as alarm area filtering) to function correctly, the following applies:

Workstation type	To record system-side events	To ensure operator activities function correctly
ProfessionalPLUS	AREA_A must be assigned to the Alarms and Events subsystem.	Assign AREA_A to the Alarms and Events subsystem. OR If AREA_A is not assigned to Alarms and Events, then deselect the Restrict on-line changes to areas assigned to the Alarms and Events subsystem in the workstation Properties dialog.
Operator stations	AREA_A must be assigned to the Alarms and Events subsystem.	Assign AREA_A to the Alarms and Events subsystem. OR If AREA_A is not assigned to Alarms and Events, then deselect the Restrict on-line changes to areas assigned to the Alarms and Events subsystem in the workstation Properties dialog.
Remote Client sessions	AREA_A must be assigned to the Alarms and Events subsystem.	AREA_A must be assigned to the Alarms and Events subsystem.

Workstation type

To record system-side events

To ensure operator activities function correctly

ProfessionalPLUS

AREA_A must be assigned to the Alarms and Events subsystem.

Assign AREA_A to the Alarms and Events subsystem.

If AREA_A is not assigned to Alarms and Events, then deselect the Restrict on-line changes to areas assigned to the Alarms and Events subsystem in the workstation Properties dialog.

Operator stations

AREA_A must be assigned to the Alarms and Events subsystem.

Assign AREA_A to the Alarms and Events subsystem.

If AREA_A is not assigned to Alarms and Events, then deselect the Restrict on-line changes to areas assigned to the Alarms and Events subsystem in the workstation Properties dialog.

Remote Client sessions

AREA_A must be assigned to the Alarms and Events subsystem.

In the next procedure we will create a plant area named TANK-101 to hold the tutorial modules.

Subtopics:

Add a plant area