SERVICES IN INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION AND CONTROL

As a control and automation engineer freelance, Bruno's activity consists to provide services in industrial automation and control : design, documentation, programming, tests, installation, setup, startup and adjustments.

Usually, the purpose of his interventions is to provide for various needs :

• Replacement of unavailable control engineers, insufficient human resources, extra works, exceptional orders, one-off projects, consultations.
• His collaboration with a company can be specific, temporary, or periodic and can be registered as a partnership.

The objects of his interventions are the programmable automated systems used in the industry :

• PLC - programmables logic controllers.
• Motion control.
• SCADA - Supervisory control and data acquisition.

• MMI - Man machine interfaces.
• Communication networks and field buses.
• Instrumentation, process control.

• Projects in relation with others systems such as industrial robots, industrial machine vision ( etc ) are possible.

About the methods, Bruno is a follower of Barry BOEHM ( professor of software engineering at the Southern California University, United States ) :

Whatever the engineering domain taken in consideration, and whatever the size of a project, it is absolutely fundamental to respect the following basic methodology :

• Writing what we want to do.
• Doing what we have written.
• Controlling that what we have done is what we have written.

Or in a more concise way, we simply could say : « write it, do it, check it ».

You can also read a short resume of Bruno's activity as a self-employed automation and control engineer since 1999.

• Pre-design, participation in the development of the user requirement specification.
• Definitions of the hardware architecture, choice of the components and the instruments.
• Drafting of the functional descriptions and the functional analysis.

• Definition of the standards, libraries, programming templates and screen models :
  • Organization of the memory zones.
  • Organization of the data.
  • Organization of the code.
  • Definition of the software structure.

  • Display models and templates.
  • Graphic symbols library.
  • Architecture and organization of the pages to display.

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• Description of the variables - mnemonics and comments.
• Programming and comments of the code.
• Unit tests, integration tests, simulations on platform or in a shop.
• Drafting of operators and maintenance manuals.
• Drafting, edition and diffusion of the full documentation of the project.

• Installation, tests and starting up of the low voltage electric plants and components.
• Inputs and outputs tests, adjustments of the detectors, actuators, instrumentation.
• Starting up, tests and adjustments of the communication systems. Controls of the inputs, outputs and data exchanged on the networks.
• Startup and adjustments of the systems and the applications.

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• Control of the start and stop modes :
  • Managing the operating modes ( production - maintenance - in case of failure. )
  • Managing the recoveries and the behaviour of the applications when a safety component is released, when an energy becomes unavailable and when emergence of failures occur.

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• Book of receipts.
• Updates of the documents.
• Forming, editing and publishing of the final folder of the project on paper and numeric media.

  ( The numerical sources of the various documents and the applications are always provided in order to allow the evolution of the application and documentation by the user ).

• Complete projects - design and installation.
• Partial projects ( integration within a total project ) - design and installation.
• Installation and startup only ( to replace a missing engineer for instance ).
• Concerning the electrical services ( engineering, execution ), co-operation with integrators.

• Worldwide, DOM-TOM and France include.

• Special machines, continuous process, handling, transporting.

  Please, see the practised industrial domain list already installed as freelance.

• Missions in hiring ( daily, weekly, monthly fixed prices ).
• Missions with fixed prices, according to detailed, exhaustive and complete specifications.

• New plants.
• Modifications, extension of existing plants.

• Documentation of existing plants ( retro-engineering ).
• Installation and startup of applications developed by other teams.