INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION AND CONTROL SYSTEMS: PLC, SCADA, Sensors, Industrial Networks, Motion Control, and Intelligent Automation (Mechatronics, Robotics & Industrial Automation)

Industrial automation now touches almost every manufactured object and every essential utility service that modern life depends upon — the water that reaches our taps, the electricity that powers our homes, the food and medicine on our shelves, and the vehicles, electronics, and packaged goods that fill global supply chains. Behind each of these is a layered, largely invisible architecture of sensors, controllers, networks, and increasingly intelligent software, engineered by practitioners drawn from electrical, mechanical, instrumentation, and software disciplines, working under the common banner of automation and control engineering.
This book was written to give students, early-career engineers, and practitioners transitioning into automation from an adjacent discipline a single, structured, and technically grounded reference spanning the full breadth of the field — from the programmable logic controller on a single machine, to the SCADA system supervising a regional utility network, to the sensors and actuators that form the physical interface with the process, to the industrial networks that connect them all, to the motion control systems that give machines dexterity and precision, and finally to the intelligent automation technologies — machine learning, digital twins, predictive maintenance — that represent the current frontier of the discipline. Throughout, the safety and cybersecurity disciplines that must accompany every automation deployment are treated not as an afterthought appended at the end, but as a thread returned to repeatedly, because a control system that is fast, flexible, and intelligent but not safe or secure has not, in any meaningful engineering sense, succeeded.
The book is organized to be read sequentially by a reader building foundational knowledge, and to serve equally well as a reference consulted chapter-by-chapter by a practitioner with a specific, immediate question — a PLC scan-cycle behavior to understand, a sensor technology to select, a network protocol to compare, a safety integrity level to specify. Each chapter is accordingly reasonably self-contained, with cross-references to related material elsewhere in the book where the topics naturally connect, as they very often do in real engineering practice: a motion control application (Part VI) depends on the industrial network (Part V) that carries its commands, which depends on the controller architecture (Part II) that generates them, all of it ultimately governed by the safety principles of Part VIII.
Automation is, and will likely remain, a field defined by continual technological change — the ladder logic language devised in 1968 to ease the transition from relay panels remains in daily use today, even as the platforms executing it have grown almost unrecognizably more capable, and even as entirely new layers of intelligent, data-driven capability have been built atop it. It is my hope that this book equips its reader not merely with a snapshot of today's specific technologies, but with the underlying engineering principles — feedback control, deterministic execution, layered architecture, disciplined safety practice — that will remain the reader's foundation as the specific tools of the discipline continue, as they always have, to evolve.
I am grateful to the broader community of automation engineers, standards bodies, and researchers whose collective, decades-long work in this field this book attempts to synthesize and present in a single, structured volume, and to every reader who takes up its study.