Operational Technology for Smart and Sustainable Systems

The systems that run the world are invisible.
This book makes them visible.

Before you finished breakfast this morning, you depended on a dozen industrial systems and never thought about one of them. The water that reached your tap was filtered, disinfected, pumped, and pressure-regulated. The electricity that boiled your kettle was balanced against national demand, second by second, so its frequency never drifted. The bread was baked by a controller no baker ever sees.

That invisible layer — the hardware and software that senses the physical world, decides, and acts — is Operational Technology. It keeps factories running through the night, holds a turbine steady against gusting wind, and shuts a pipeline valve in the half-second before a pressure spike becomes an explosion.

And here is the truth that defines this field: no one discipline can build it alone. A single pumping station already needs the mechanical engineer, the electrical engineer, the software engineer, the network engineer, and the data analyst — all in the same room, thinking together. OT is where engineering disciplines are forced to cooperate. This book teaches you to be the engineer who can.

Who this book is for

You've finished an undergraduate engineering degree of some kind. You think in code, or in voltages, or in forces and flows — fluent in one technical language, and ready to learn the others. You don't need prior control theory. You don't need to read a ladder-logic diagram or size a pump yet. You need a guide that meets you where you are and brings you to the same starting line as every other engineer in the room. That's exactly how this book is built.

What's inside

Across 13 chapters and 7 appendices, this graduate-level text takes you from first principles to a full capstone design project:

• Sensing and measurement — how OT systems come to know the physical world
• Control, controllers, and automation logic — the beating heart of every industrial system
• SCADA, HMIs, industrial networks, and IT–OT convergence
• Digital twins and AI in industrial operations
• OT for energy, water, renewables, and green manufacturing — the sustainability thread running through the entire second half
• OT cybersecurity, functional safety, and standards that govern real plants

Every chapter closes with four-tier review questions and hands-on exercises — because OT is a physical subject, and reading about a control loop is no substitute for watching one oscillate.

The full book is now free

Start with the opening chapters, "Finding Your Entry Point" and "Common Ground for Every Engineer," which show how your background connects to OT and give every reader the shared vocabulary the rest of the book builds on. Then keep going — the complete book is available to read below, page by page.