Control Engineering Editing and Proofreading Services

Control systems are specified in one language and built in another. An engineer describes what the plant should do; a programmer turns that into logic; a commissioning engineer discovers on site what was actually meant. The distance between those three understandings is measured in weeks of commissioning, and it is created almost entirely by the document that sits between them.

We edit what control and automation engineers produce — control narratives and functional design specifications, sequence of operation documents, interlock and permissive schedules, alarm philosophies and alarm rationalisation records, cause and effect matrices, instrument specifications and datasheets, PLC and DCS software design descriptions, HMI and graphics standards, factory and site acceptance test procedures, loop tuning and commissioning records, safety instrumented system requirement specifications, and operator and maintenance documentation. Our editors work on the document the programmer builds from.

The control narrative is where automation projects are won or lost, and its failure mode is describing steady-state behaviour and nothing else. Normal running is the easy part and the part everyone agrees on; commissioning time is consumed by the states nobody wrote down. We work through these so every mode of operation is covered — start-up, normal, shutdown, emergency stop, power restoration, manual override and each degraded state — because a system whose behaviour after a power interruption was never specified will do something, and nobody chose what; so each interlock states what it prevents, what condition releases it, and whether it can be bypassed, by whom and with what record; so every alarm carries the operator action it demands, since an alarm with no response is a nuisance that trains people to ignore the ones that matter; so equipment behaviour on loss of signal, loss of air and loss of power is specified individually rather than covered by a general statement, given that fail-safe means a different position for different valves on the same plant; and so the narrative distinguishes what the system does from what the operator must do, because ambiguity there is discovered at three in the morning. Narratives written this way turn commissioning into testing instead of negotiation.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including process information, control logic and site documentation. We are editors rather than control engineers, and we offer no view on control philosophy, logic or safety functions. What we can do is make the specification say what happens in every state, not just the normal one.