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A deviation Alarm is commonly used to report an excess deviation between a desired set point level of a process value and an actual measurement of that value. The deviation Alarm becomes active when the deviation exceeds or drops below a defined limit.

For example, if a set point had a value of 10, a high deviation Alarm limit of 2 and a low deviation Alarm limit of -1 then the low sub state is entered if the process value drops below 9; the high sub state is entered if the process value raises above 12. If the set point were changed to 11 then the new deviation values would be 10 and 13 respectively. The set point can be fixed by a configuration, adjusted by an Operator or it can be adjusted by an algorithm, the actual functionality exposed by the set point is application specific. The deviation Alarm can also be used to report a problem between a redundant data source where the difference between the primary source and the secondary source exceeds the included limit. In this case, the SetpointNode would point to the secondary source.