A scenario for creating threat levels is in case of a fire.
If a fire breaks out, some actions that you want the system to respond with are the following:
- Sound the fire alarm.NOTE: For the sake of illustration only. Not a recommended practice.
- Unlock all doors to let people evacuate.NOTE: For the sake of illustration only. Not a recommended practice.
- Log off all low priority users to free up your resources (especially network bandwidth), for high priority users to manage the current threat.
- Record the entire evacuation process at high video quality for as long as it lasts.
A threat level for responding to a fire could be configured as follows:
When an operator sets this threat level, the following actions are executed by the system:
- Trigger output:
Sounds the fire alarm by sending the Fire alarm output behavior to the output relay Building Exit - Output-1, assuming that this is where the alarm bell is connected. - Set the door maintenance mode: Sets all doors within the area where the threat level is set to maintenance mode, effectively unlocking all of them for an indefinite period of time. This is better than using the Unlock door explicitly action which only unlocks the doors for a few seconds.
- Set minimum user level: Immediately logs off all users with a user level lower than 1, basically every one that is not an administrator, encouraging them to leave their desk at once, as well as stopping all unnecessary activity on the network, so the administrators can have as much bandwidth as possible at their disposal to deal with the situation.NOTE: This action is only executed if the threat level is set at the system level. So if the fire is limited to one area, we do not want to log off everyone from the system.
- Override with event recording quality: Boosts the recording quality of all cameras within the area where the threat level is set to event recording quality.
- Start recording: Starts recording on all cameras within the area where the threat level is set for an infinite duration, or until it the Stop recording command is issued.
When an operator clears this threat level, the following actions are executed by the system:
- Trigger output: Stops the fire alarm by sending the Normal output behavior to the output relay Building Exit - Output-1.
- Set the door maintenance mode: Turns off the maintenance mode on all doors within the area where the threat level is set. This effectively restores all doors to their normal behavior.
- Set minimum user level: Resets the minimum user level to 254 (the lowest value), allowing all users to log back on.
- Recording quality as standard configuration: Restores the standard recording quality on all cameras within the area where the threat level is set.
- Stop recording: Stops recording on all cameras within the area where the threat level is set. This action will not stop the recording on cameras that are on a continuous recording schedule.
