The Control Room

About

What this is

A vendor-neutral editorial reference on operating industrial control systems. No products, no downloads, and no connection to any company that previously used this domain name.

Home/About
Not the software company that used to be here. This domain name was previously used by a control system software vendor. This publication has no connection to that company: we are not it, we do not represent it, we hold none of its software, documentation, licences or customer records, and we cannot supply, support or license any product.

If you are looking for that product — for a download, a licence, support or a quotation — this is not the right place and we cannot help. Nothing on this site is a continuation of it.

The Control Room publishes guides on what happens to a control system after it is installed: keeping the alarm system usable, designing displays that support decisions, configuring a historian whose data survives an investigation, running commissioning and change with enough discipline that the system remains explicable, and managing an ageing installation that has to keep running.

Who it is written for

Control and instrumentation engineers, process engineers with a control responsibility, operations supervisors, and the people who inherit a system built by somebody who has left.

Most published material in this field comes from vendors and describes what their products do. Very little of it addresses the position most sites are actually in: an installed system of uncertain vintage, a documentation set of uncertain accuracy, and a small team keeping it running alongside everything else.

Vendor-neutral, and what that means here

  • No products are sold, recommended, ranked or scored.
  • No vendor has any relationship with this site, and none has paid for anything.
  • No advertising, no sponsored articles, no guest posts and no paid links.
  • No downloads, demonstrations, quotations, licences or support are offered.
  • Where a product category is discussed, it is discussed generically.

Standards are the authority, not this site

Several areas covered here are governed by published standards and industry guidance — alarm management, HMI design, functional safety, industrial system security. Where those are referenced, it is so that readers can go to the source.

The standards themselves, together with your own site procedures and any applicable regulatory requirements, are the authority. These guides describe common engineering practice around them and are not a substitute for either the standards or competent advice on your own installation.

Safety-related systems. Nothing here should be applied to safety instrumented systems, protective functions or any other safety-related equipment without reference to the applicable functional safety standards, your site’s functional safety management arrangements, and appropriately competent personnel. Requirements differ by jurisdiction and by sector.

How the guides are put together

Each guide covers one problem and tries to answer it at a level an engineer could act on: what to decide, what to measure, what to write down, and what the failure looks like when it is got wrong. Where a recommendation carries a cost — and most do — the cost is stated rather than omitted.

The full list is in the index.