Why did the line stop?
P‑ATLAS reads the PLC program that runs your machines and answers that question, traced backwards through the logic and cited to the block, network and rung. Press Why? on an alarm.
| Time | No. | Text | State | Explain |
|---|
Illustrative line and incidents, not customer data. Every citation below points to a real kind of place in a TIA Portal project.
Measured
It has read a real production program.
One Siemens TIA Portal project from a running production line, 385 MB, read in 14.2 seconds: 17,167 entities, 22,102 relationships between them, 614 findings surfaced in 37 ms, 92% of networks explained.
All numbers from that one program. No other claims of scale are made.
P‑ATLAS is working today at one of Italy's largest confectionery factories, on the program that runs the line. Under a one-year deployment contract, a further intelligence layer is being deployed in collaboration with one of the world's leading makers of automatic packaging machines.
Both names are under NDA, so this page uses neither, and none of their data.
How it works
The program becomes a graph. The alarm becomes a walk.
Read
Import the TIA Portal project: blocks, networks, instructions, tags and wiring. The HMI project is optional; it adds the operator's own alarm text.
Model
Every block, network, tag and hardware point becomes an entity; every read, write, call and wire becomes a directed edge. The whole machine's logic, as one graph.
Answer
From any alarm, walk the writers backwards. Every hop is a real rung with a real address. The answer is the chain, and it stops where the program's evidence stops instead of guessing.
Check
Where a controller is reachable, read its live values over S7, S7CommPlus or Modbus TCP and lay them on the same graph. It reads; it never writes.
Connector validated against simulated devices so far.Why now
The people who knew the code are leaving.
49 → 81 minTime to restore production, five-year change
Across five years, unplanned stops got rarer (incidents fell 41%) and longer: the time to get production running again rose 65%. Siemens calls it a skills and knowledge gap. The machine's logic is written in the program; the knowledge of why it does what it does is in one or two people's heads.
Siemens Senseye, The True Cost of Downtime 2024, p. 11.
Limits
What it does not do.
- It shows none of its clients' data.
- One factory, one deployment contract, one collaboration with a machine builder, all under NDA. Every alarm, value and citation on this page is illustrative.
- It sees only what the export exposes.
- The reader is built around Siemens TIA Portal project structures. Coverage is bounded by what the vendor export contains.
- It does not guess past missing evidence.
- An unread block or a tag with no writer stops the walk. P‑ATLAS reports the gap rather than inventing the hop that would close it.
- It never writes to the PLC.
- The live layer reads. Program changes go through an offline, guarded workflow: validate, back up, import, compile, restore on failure. They stay a person's action.
Founder
Built by one person, end to end.
Giuliano Pioldi wrote the TIA Portal readers, the causal graph engine, the live-value connector, the guarded change workflow, and this page.
- M.Eng. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University, 2026. B.Sc. Engineering, Università degli Studi di Parma.L'Eco di Bergamo, 21 Dec 2025; AI Summit NY speaker profile.
- Main-stage speaker, AI Summit New York, December 2025.L'Eco di Bergamo, 21 Dec 2025.
- Gold medalist in programming olympiads; multiple-time medalist in technical competitions.Founder-stated, in writing. Not independently verified.
- Years of industrial automation engineering at GP4ISI, alongside quantitative research.Founder-stated, in writing.
The AI Summit's speaker profile describes him as "one of Italy's most promising young engineers": their words, quoted, not ours.
Next
Bring one alarm and the program behind it.
A founder-led technical walkthrough: the import, the causal walk, and the exact citation it resolves to.
or write to gpioldi@gp4isi.com