Industry directory

The brain of discrete and manufacturing automation. Deterministic scan cycle, IEC 61131-3 languages, redundancy, fieldbus and OPC UA integration. Major vendors, architecture choices and 2026 trends — TSN, edge, security-by-design.

The control system for continuous, I/O-heavy processes — petrochemicals, refining, power, pharma, pulp and paper. Distributed architecture, native redundancy, integrated engineering, advanced regulation.

Supervision and data acquisition over wide infrastructure — power grids, pipelines, water utilities, smart grid, multi-site telemetry. Client/server or web architecture, long-distance communications (DNP3, IEC 60870, IEC 61850), historian, alarm management, IIoT and MQTT Sparkplug integration.

The screen that separates the operator from the process. ISA-101 high-performance design (dominant gray, color reserved for abnormal, screen hierarchy), ISA-18.2 alarm management, industrial panels and web-native HMI, emerging AR/VR.

PLCs that don't go wrong — or rather that detect their own failures and go to safe state. Certified IEC 61508 SIL 2 to SIL 3, internal redundant architecture (1oo2D, 2oo3), continuous diagnostics, separation of standard / safety logic.

Exhaustive overview of industrial communication protocols: legacy serial buses (Modbus, PROFIBUS, HART, AS-i…), deterministic Industrial Ethernet (PROFINET, EtherNet/IP, EtherCAT, POWERLINK), application layers (OPC UA, MQTT Sparkplug), utility/SCADA protocols (DNP3, IEC 60870, IEC 61850), safety…

Regulatory and technical framework for equipment intended for areas where explosive atmospheres can form — gases, vapours, mists, combustible dusts. Everything you need to read an Ex marking, select the right equipment and classify zones.

Functional safety reduces risk through active systems — sensor, logic, actuator — with a demonstrable, maintained level of integrity. IEC 61508 is the base standard; each sector derives its own variant. Overview of the 61508 family, the integrity scales (SIL, PL, ASIL) and the standards per domain.

Securing industrial control systems — PLCs, DCS, SCADA, RTUs, IIoT. IEC 62443, NIS2, Cyber Resilience Act. Purdue model, segmentation, ICS intrusion detection, OT incident response — fundamentals to protect a plant against Stuxnet, Triton and Industroyer.

Securing the corporate information system — endpoints, servers, cloud, applications, data. ISO 27001, NIST CSF, Zero Trust, defense in depth, governance and compliance with GDPR / NIS2 / DORA. The digital counterpart of OT security, with its own logics and tool ecosystem.

The most demanding industry for functional safety, explosion protection and OT cybersecurity. From wellhead to terminal, every unit combines high-hazard continuous process, explosive atmospheres and critical infrastructure.

The major-hazard industry par excellence: exothermic reactions, toxic and flammable products, Seveso-classified sites. From steam cracker to fine chemicals, process control rests on risk analysis, safety instrumented systems and a process-safety culture inherited from the largest industrial…

An industry driven first by quality and regulatory compliance. Here the hazard is not explosion but the non-conforming product: an out-of-spec batch, an altered record, a contamination. Good manufacturing practice, data integrity and computerized system validation shape every piece of automation.

An industry where risk is measured in public health and consumer trust. Here automation serves three masters: food safety, hygienic equipment design, and the safety of high-throughput machinery. All under heavy pressure on cost, speed and traceability.

The critical infrastructure par excellence: generating, transmitting and distributing electricity while continuously balancing supply and demand, to the millisecond.

The sector reshaping the electricity mix: solar, wind, hydro and storage. The technical challenge is no longer to generate, but to integrate variable, decentralized production into a grid designed for dispatchable plants — without degrading stability.

The industry where safety overrides everything else. Here instrumentation and control is not a productivity tool but a safety barrier — classified, redundant, diverse and qualified. Three major accidents shaped an entire discipline: defense in depth, safety culture, severe-accident management.

A vital public service and a critical infrastructure spread over hundreds of kilometres: abstract, treat, distribute, then collect and treat wastewater. The challenge is not high pressure but supervising thousands of remote sites — and the sanitary quality of the water, at every moment.

The world of assembly and machining: automotive, electronics, machine tools, capital goods. Here reign robotics, throughput, flexibility and machinery safety. It is also the historical playground of Industry 4.0 — digital twins, OPC UA, MES.

Among the harshest environments in industry: dust, vibration, heat, gas, and machines weighing hundreds of tonnes. Automation pursues two goals: extracting and processing ever more efficiently, and moving people away from danger — up to autonomous mines and haul trucks.

One of the most integrated continuous processes in industry: from wood to reel, through chemical pulping and the paper machine. High intensity in water, steam and energy, heavy DCS automation, and a signature hazard of its own — the recovery boiler explosion.

The industries of fire: rotary kilns at 1450 °C, glass melting furnaces at 1500 °C, running continuously for years. Highly energy- and CO₂-intensive — cement alone accounts for about 7 to 8 % of global emissions — they are now at the front line of decarbonization.

Moving millions of people and tonnes safely, on time. Rail is one of the world's largest users of functional safety (SIL 4 signalling), alongside airports, ports and tunnels — all critical infrastructure, heavily automated and cyber-exposed.

The automation that surrounds us unseen: building management systems, civil structures, data centers. Systems long isolated, now connected — and therefore to be secured — and central to energy efficiency and service continuity.

The cleanest, most flexible fossil fuel. Gas halves power-generation emissions versus coal and starts in minutes to balance intermittency — but leaking methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and the LNG chain demands end-to-end cryogenic control.

Still the world's largest energy source and the backbone of transport. Oil is refined into fuels and products, but it faces decarbonization, electrification and a forecast demand peak — driving low-carbon fuels for hard-to-electrify uses.

Coal still supplies about a third of the world's electricity, carried by a huge existing fleet of power stations. But this fleet is in managed decline: developed countries are closing more capacity than they build.

A low-carbon, dispatchable electricity source — about twelve grams of CO₂ per kWh, providing baseload. Its founding constraint: defence in depth, a stack of barriers and safety systems. Its revival: fleet life extension, the EPR and small modular reactors (SMRs).

Turning light into electricity, then injecting it into a grid not designed for it. The technical challenge of PV is not the cell — it is the whole chain: array design, power electronics, DC safety, performance measurement and gigawatt-scale operation.

Capturing the sun's heat rather than its photons. The decisive advantage of concentrated solar power (CSP) over photovoltaics is built-in thermal storage — molten salts that make solar electricity dispatchable after sunset. The same principle also delivers large-scale industrial and district heat.

Extracting energy from a variable wind, on a 200-metre machine under fatigue for twenty-five years, sometimes 30 kilometres offshore. Wind power is a problem of mechanical loads, real-time control and remote operation as much as generation.

The oldest source of renewable electricity, and still the largest in the world. Mature and dispatchable, it provides the inertia, frequency control and fast start the grid needs more than ever as variable renewables grow. The engineering centres on dam safety, turbines and control.

Turning organic matter into heat, power and gas. Unlike solar and wind, bioenergy is dispatchable and stores energy in the fuel itself, but its sustainability and carbon accounting are debated. The engineering must handle fuel logistics, combustion emissions and explosive dust.

Tapping the Earth's heat to produce both electricity and direct heat. Unlike sun and wind, geothermal runs around the clock, as baseload, day and night. But it depends on the resource underground: the main risks sit at the drilling, fluid-chemistry and induced-seismicity end, not in the power block.

Extracting energy from tides, currents and waves. The great attraction: tides are perfectly predictable, years ahead, unlike sun and wind. But most marine technologies remain pre-commercial, because the sea is a brutal place to build and maintain machines.

The largest real-time system ever built. The grid carries energy from generation to use, balancing supply and demand by the second — with little bulk storage. Its transformation: integrating variable, decentralized generation while holding frequency and stability.

Where you can neither electrify nor store in a battery — steel, fertilizers, heavy transport — hydrogen produced by electrolysis from renewables becomes the carrier. The challenge is not making the molecule, but doing so at a viable cost, safely, while following variable power production.

Renewables produce when they can, not when needed. Storage bridges that gap: it absorbs surplus, delivers at peak and stabilizes frequency in milliseconds. It has become the piece that makes a majority-renewable grid possible — provided thermal runaway is controlled.

The quiet giant of energy storage: pump water uphill when power is cheap or in surplus, then release it through turbines at peak demand. Pumped storage still holds the vast majority of the world's grid storage capacity, far ahead of batteries. It is the proven way to store energy for hours to days.

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions from industrial sites — through efficiency, electrification, hydrogen, carbon capture and renewables. EU ETS / CBAM / CSRD regulatory framework, scopes 1/2/3, technical levers and reporting.

Reducing energy consumption for the same delivered service — always the first economic lever before any substitution investment. ISO 50001, EU Energy Efficiency Directive, audits, IE3/IE4 motors, heat recovery, measurement and verification.

Predictive maintenance replaces the calendar with the machine's real condition: measure continuously, detect drift, act just before failure. The challenge is not the algorithm but the data — scarce, noisy, and rarely labelled with real failures.

Machine vision inspects 100% of production at line speed, where the human eye tires. Deep learning has widened its reach to variable, ill-defined defects. But success is decided first on lighting and optics, not on the neural network.

Large language models are entering automation engineering: generate IEC 61131-3 code, draft specifications, translate and document, assist diagnosis. The productivity gain is real — but a model that "makes things up" in a safety context is a hazard. The rule: AI proposes, the engineer validates.

Industrial AI is entering the regulated era. The EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) classifies each system by risk level and imposes dated, quantified obligations; ISO/IEC 42001 provides the management system to comply. For an engineer, three concrete questions: is my system "high-risk"?