• Maintain reliable operation of the production building distributed control and related systems, ensuring maximum system availability and acceptable performance e.g. response times, number of failures.
• Support the production area and project team demands by developing and implementing new application software, to agreed timescales.
• Generate, maintain and adhere to local site procedures concerning the operation, maintenance and development of the control and related systems.
• Use the production building change and version control system ensuring all software changes are carried out in line with GXP and HSE requirements.
• Provide local expertise for distributed control and related systems problems. This involves problem identification, problem solving and where necessary, utilizing the appropriate specialist or external organization.
• Some of my time was also dedicated to Unix system administration and development of system utility programmes using shell scripts.
• Development of a recipe version control system complete with GUI using Perl and Perl/Tk.
• Development of graphics for part of the operator interface of the batch control system. A combination of shell-scripting and C programming was used to automate the generation and maintenance of the graphics.
• Assist in training of control system users.

The duties involved all aspects relating to the requirement, specification and design of software and hardware for automated process equipment, real-time distributed control, and hierarchical MIS and SCADA systems for allied industries. A combination of IBM DB2 database and C Programming together with embedded SQL was used for the development of MIS and SCADA system.

Responsible to the Head of Department for the development of software and associated hardware in relation to a self-tuning control system for regulation of blood gas levels in the artificial lung. Work included 6 months bridging course emphasizing the application of engineering principles in medicine. During the Initial investigational part of the project I had to develop a mathematical model of the blood-gas exchange across permeable tubular membrane using FORTRAN programming.