HACKER Q&A
📣 exabrial

How to learn about safety systems and closed loop systems?


Recently, we've had a couple of failures at work that were caused by chain reactions of unmonitored things. We do our best to try and monitor everything, but really, I would like us to engineer for failure modes.

After reading the excellent writeup on partitioning of the European Power Grid, and more recently about automotive CAN networks, I'd like to learn about writing software for safety systems.

Where is a good source of the basics? Thank you!


  👤 jschveibinz Accepted Answer ✓
tl;dr Learn analog control theory, then digital control theory. Then you will be very qualified to write software for safety systems.

Control theory is the best place to start (analog) before digital control theory, but it is a lot of math.

Digital controls is a way of building discrete (sampled rather than continuous) models and systems. Almost all control systems these days are digital—-but even modern equipment like aircraft still have some analog control systems.

To write software for safety systems such as power grid control, you should understand the fundamentals and applications of digital control theory so that your requirements, design and software will be effective.