Alarm acknowledgment workflow in SCADA systems - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Alarm acknowledgment workflow

📖 Scenario: You work in a control room monitoring a SCADA system that manages factory equipment. When alarms trigger, operators must acknowledge them to confirm they are aware and taking action.This project simulates a simple alarm acknowledgment workflow to help you understand how alarms are tracked and acknowledged in SCADA systems.

🎯 Goal: Build a small program that stores active alarms, marks alarms as acknowledged, and shows the updated alarm status.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary called active_alarms with alarm IDs as keys and alarm descriptions as values.

Create a list called acknowledged_alarms to track which alarms have been acknowledged.

Write a loop to acknowledge alarms with IDs in a given list alarms_to_acknowledge by adding them to acknowledged_alarms.

Print the final status of all alarms showing if each alarm is acknowledged or not.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

SCADA systems in factories and utilities use alarm acknowledgment workflows to ensure operators respond to critical events promptly.

💼 Career

Understanding alarm tracking and acknowledgment is important for roles in industrial automation, control room operations, and system monitoring.

1

Create the active alarms dictionary

Create a dictionary called active_alarms with these exact entries: 101: 'High temperature', 102: 'Low pressure', 103: 'Power failure'.

SCADA systems

# Create the active_alarms dictionary with alarm IDs and descriptions
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces {} to create a dictionary with keys as numbers and values as strings.

2

Create the acknowledged alarms list

Create an empty list called acknowledged_alarms to store IDs of alarms that have been acknowledged.

SCADA systems

active_alarms = {101: 'High temperature', 102: 'Low pressure', 103: 'Power failure'}
# Create an empty list called acknowledged_alarms
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use square brackets [] to create an empty list.

3

Acknowledge specific alarms

Create a list called alarms_to_acknowledge with values 101 and 103. Then write a for loop using alarm_id to iterate over alarms_to_acknowledge and add each alarm_id to the acknowledged_alarms list.

SCADA systems

active_alarms = {101: 'High temperature', 102: 'Low pressure', 103: 'Power failure'}
acknowledged_alarms = []
# Create alarms_to_acknowledge list with 101 and 103
# Use a for loop with alarm_id to add each alarm_id to acknowledged_alarms
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a for loop to go through each alarm ID and add it to the acknowledged list using append().

4

Print alarm acknowledgment status

Use a for loop with variables alarm_id and description to iterate over active_alarms.items(). Inside the loop, print the alarm ID, description, and 'Acknowledged' if alarm_id is in acknowledged_alarms, otherwise print 'Unacknowledged'.

SCADA systems

active_alarms = {101: 'High temperature', 102: 'Low pressure', 103: 'Power failure'}
acknowledged_alarms = []
alarms_to_acknowledge = [101, 103]
for alarm_id in alarms_to_acknowledge:
    acknowledged_alarms.append(alarm_id)
# Use a for loop with alarm_id, description in active_alarms.items()
# Print alarm ID, description, and 'Acknowledged' or 'Unacknowledged'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use an if expression inside the loop to decide the status text. Use print(f"...") for formatted output.