Industrial automation

What is technically different in this industry #

Service life. A production line runs for twenty years, and the software on it is expected to survive ten of them. That shifts every technology decision: not what is most elegant today, but what will still be maintainable in eight years.

Heterogeneity as the norm. Controllers of different generations and manufacturers sit side by side. Some speak OPC UA, some Modbus, some a proprietary protocol documented only on paper. We have built our own transport implementations for such cases several times.

Availability before elegance. A software fault costs production time. That is the reason we decouple acquisition from analysis via an event stream: if the analysis fails, the measurements keep flowing.

Security at the network border. The moment plant data leaves the site, an automation project becomes a security project. Encrypted communication, certificate management and authentication belong in the same design for us, not in a follow-up project.

What we have done here #

For a leading international plant manufacturer in the metals industry we developed a scalable platform for industrial data exchange — with end-to-end secured communication and responsibility for architecture, technology selection, security concept, training and arc42 architecture documentation. At the same client, the migration of a mature C++ backend to .NET Core followed.