This master’s thesis is written at the Universität Stuttgart and submitted to Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Master of Science degree in Industrial Engineering. The thesis is carried out by the student Laura Villar Rio, participating in the Erasmus+ exchange program. It is supervised by M.Sc Caren Dripke, researcher of the Institute for Control Engineering of Machine Tools and Manufacturing Units (ISW). The thesis is also framed within the DEVEKOS project, a project carried out by several organizations such as the ISW. The context of this project is the age of digitization and industry 4.0. Thanks to the miniaturization of the electronics, control, actuators and sensors now the components can be integrated into a tight space. The embedded software makes such components intelligent and they offer their own abilities in the form of manufacturer-standardized automation functions. These skills are composed in the engineering of machine integrators to higher-quality skills until a level of skill is reached that corresponds to the process of the product being produced. This results in a component-based automation with a suitable component-oriented engineering approach - both prerequisites for the implementation of the currently emerging industry 4.0 standards. A Distributed Control System (DCS), which will be implemented in this thesis, increases reliability and reduces installation costs by localizing control functions near the process plant, but enables monitoring and supervisory control of the process remotely. The key attribute of a DCS is its reliability due to the distribution of the control processing around nodes in the system. This mitigates a single processor failure. If a processor fails, it will only affect one section of the plant process, as opposed to a failure of a central computer, which would affect the whole process, increasing also productivity. This distribution of computing power local to the field Input/Output (I/O) field connection racks also ensures fast controller processing times by removing possible network and central processing delays. Another advantage, which makes these systems appropriate for the Industry 4.0, is that the introduction of distributed control allowed easy interconnection and re-configuration of plant controls such as cascaded loops and interlocks, and easy interfacing with other production computer systems. In line with the digitization that Industry 4.0 heralds, future control system functionality will be decided by software and firmware upgrades and be completely independent of hardware in the future. This will allow the user to purchase the control system hardware with limited functionality and as requirements increase they can continue to upgrade to add additional functionality as required — such as faster cycle times, additional communication interfaces etc. To achieve this goal this project is going to use Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) completely reprogrammable and with high capabilities. It also allows faster update times when new functionality is developed as this functionality can be available as soon as the firmware is upgraded, in the same way as a smartphone.