Alarm flooding prevention in SCADA systems - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Alarm Flooding Prevention

📖 Scenario: You work with a SCADA system that monitors many sensors in a factory. Sometimes, many alarms trigger at once, causing alarm flooding. This makes it hard for operators to focus on the most important alarms.Your task is to build a simple alarm flooding prevention logic that limits how many alarms can be active at the same time.

🎯 Goal: Build a small program that keeps track of active alarms and prevents more than a set number of alarms from being active simultaneously.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a list of current active alarms with exact alarm IDs

Add a configuration variable for the maximum allowed active alarms

Write logic to check if a new alarm can be added without exceeding the limit

Print the final list of active alarms after trying to add a new alarm

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

In real SCADA systems, alarm flooding can overwhelm operators and cause important alarms to be missed. Limiting active alarms helps maintain focus and safety.

💼 Career

Understanding alarm management is important for SCADA engineers and DevOps professionals working in industrial automation and monitoring systems.

1

Create the initial list of active alarms

Create a list called active_alarms with these exact alarm IDs: "A101", "A102", "A103".

SCADA systems

# Create the list active_alarms with the given alarm IDs
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use square brackets to create a list and include the alarm IDs as strings separated by commas.

2

Add the maximum active alarms configuration

Add a variable called max_active_alarms and set it to 5.

SCADA systems

active_alarms = ["A101", "A102", "A103"]
# Add max_active_alarms variable and set it to 5
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just create a variable and assign the number 5 to it.

3

Check if a new alarm can be added

Write an if statement to check if the length of active_alarms is less than max_active_alarms. If yes, add the new alarm ID "A104" to active_alarms.

SCADA systems

active_alarms = ["A101", "A102", "A103"]
max_active_alarms = 5
# Add logic to add "A104" if active alarms are below max
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use len() to get the number of active alarms and append() to add the new alarm.

4

Print the final list of active alarms

Write a print statement to display the active_alarms list.

SCADA systems

active_alarms = ["A101", "A102", "A103"]
max_active_alarms = 5
if len(active_alarms) < max_active_alarms:
    active_alarms.append("A104")
# Print the active_alarms list
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(active_alarms) to show the list.