TECHNICAL RESOURCES IN AUTOMATION AND CONTROL

The world of industrial automation is complex. It is the point where many different technologies are meeting together, while using many specialized and very different techniques.

More, new needs and new constraints lead the manufacturers to create new solutions, and sometimes new technologies.

And more, the life time of an industrial automated application is about from five years to twenty or thirty years (following the applications taken in consideration).

Then an automation engineer must control all the obsolete techniques and all the obsolete devices in usage, in addition to the current ones.

So, it is very important for maintenance to get (and to archive) technical documentation.

This file without claim is intended for engineering teams in industrial companies, in order to be used as a basic tool and to facilitate (or to accelerate) a search for informations.

It is question above all of collecting a non exhaustive list of links to resources available on Internet, concerning by near or by far any professional in relation with industrial automation and control.

Each of these selected web sites shows a set of informations reporting many techniques in varied areas.

These techniques are those used in control-command, in instrumentation and in robotics, in electricity or in networking.

• You will discover educational directories offering lessons about industrial automation technologies, or offering technical papers.
• You can refer to a selection of Schneider Electric technical papers which concern automation, motors, electricity, safety and some expert papers such as the fuzzy logic applied to automated industrial usages.
• You will find a list of forums specialized in industrial areas (automation, control, instrumentation and more).

This set of resources reporting on techniques used to control and to command automated plants in the industry lists educational papers, white papers and other technical documentation.

• Control and command techniques such as control loop, PID loop and advanced control.
• Automation in general, logic, electro-technology, batch processes (S88) and management executive systems (MES, S95) too.
• Automation software such as the excellent PROVIEW, an open source control system for instance.
• Informations about some useful tools and software.

This folder groups a selection of resources which report on measurement techniques and technologies.

• The "concepts" section reports on a selection of educational papers and technical papers about basics and fundamentals in instrumentation.
• The "measurement technologies" section refers to sensors technologies. It includes level metering, flow metering and temperature metering.
• The "interfaces" area lists documents about instruments interfaces (FDT) and instruments configuration software (Pactware).

Networks are more and more important in automated applications. Here are some informations about them.

• You can access papers about basics and fundamentals in networking, about some protocols and about Ethernet and IP protocols.
• You can read documentation about many field networks, about many control buses and about many sensors and actuators networks, including IO link.
• You will find informations about instrumentation networks, about vision system networks dedicated to image transfers (especially used by machine vision), you will learn how a HART modem is working, or what is a virtual serial port.
• Finally, you will get matter about wireless networks technologies with a list of some utility software, and you will get informations about a few miscellaneous networks sometime used in the industry (USB bus for instance).

Here, you will link towards very well written papers about the concepts used in image processing and machine vision technologies.

Then, you will get knowledge in colour technology and in color processing, before being introduced to some standards (Genicam, EMVA 1288).

You will get here some informations about the technology, the geometry, the kinematic, the trajectories and the architectures of the industrial robots.

You will link towards sites showing trends and economical statistics, towards some research projects (the robot "SYR" for instance) and towards some international projects (SME robot).

Right now, it is essential for the industry to know how are critical the digital threats and how strategic is the digital security of its control systems.

At first, you can discover here a vulnerabilities observatory which registers detected vulnerabilities since the year 1902.

You can access its database in detail by filtering, displaying all which concerns the industry for instance, or whatever else you want.

And may be you will be discovering that your production plants are very vulnerable.

Then, there is a list of some prevention free software (anti-virus, firewalls, anti-tracking) for personal or mobile usages, and a list of some useful security utilities for networking usage (FreeRadius, Open VPN, Open SSL, NMAP).

In this folder, you can access to the technical documentation of some manufacturers (Allen Bradley, Siemens or SEW Eurodrive for instance) of devices used in factory automation (programmable controllers, inverters, motion axis controllers) and in instrumentation (Krohne, National Instruments and more).