Group project for the Industrial Automation course at EPFL, spring 2025.
The course walked through every layer of an industrial automation stack - from field instrumentation (sensors, actuators, drives, safety devices), through PLC programming and PROFINET, up to SCADA supervision and dependability/safety analysis. To finish things off, we applied all of it to designing a plant: an automated chocolate powder production line, taken from a functional analysis and P&ID through selection of named SIEMENS parts (SINAMICS drives, SITRANS sensors, SIPART positioners, SIRIUS safety gear), a PLC and PROFINET architecture, a SCADA market survey, and a qualitative dependability analysis with FMEA and a Fault Tree.
I have always been very interested in IoT and operational technology, mostly from a cybersecurity angle, so it was nice to look at it from the other side and see what is actually deployed out there - and just how old and legacy a lot of it still feels.
