What the Action Calendar Does

About this task

The Action Calendar option gives you, the system administrator, the ability to build a set of automated events that can be applied in one area of or throughout your plant. You can invoke events with associated actions at specific times of a day and during day types (for example, weekdays) that you define.

An action can be any action supported by the Event Editor. For example an action can set a point, generate an alarm, download a recipe or even run a user written Basic Script.

Note: The Action Calendar schedules events with associated actions. It is not designed for Production scheduling.

The Action Calendar has two major components. The:

Procedure

  1. Graphical User Interface (GUI) allows users to interactively configure and view schedule information.
  2. Scheduler is responsible for ensuring that your operations are initiated at the appropriate times.

    Action Calendar's Graphical User Interface

    The Graphical User Interface, which has a familiar electronic day planner appearance:

    • Provides the screens needed for you to configure all Calendar data, including areas, event actions, and schedules.
    • Lets you project what events are scheduled either today or for any date in the future, based on existing Action Calendar configuration data.
    • Lets you specify exceptions to these standard schedules, as needed, to meet production needs for a specific date. These schedule overrides can be used to completely alter a day's schedule (for example, to accommodate holidays), or to modify, add, or skip a single event on a specified date.

    Action Calendar's Scheduler

    The Action Calendar's Scheduler is a CIMPLICITY resident process that:

    • Determines the daily production schedules by:
  3. Combining all standard events for the current date.
  4. Applying all overrides associated with that date, until the total plant wide schedule has been calculated.
    • Initiates events based on these schedules.
    • Performs periodic cleanup of the Action Calendar configuration data so that outdated information (in particular, overrides that correspond to dates in the past) is automatically purged from the system.