Patent ID: 8032788

Claim:
A method for managing the restarting of automatic control equipment, said automatic control equipment comprising: a main electrical power supply, a volatile memory containing data and an application program for controlling and/or monitoring a process to be automated, at least one first non-volatile memory containing a backup of a version of the application program and a first signature associated with the mapping of the data of this application program in the volatile memory, said method comprising: backing up, on an outage of the main electrical power supply, in a second non-volatile memory of the automatic control equipment, the data and a second signature associated with the mapping of the data, in the volatile memory, of the application program which is running at the time of the outage; after the main electrical power supply has been restored, reloading the application program into the volatile memory from the first non-volatile memory; and comparing the first signature and the second signature; performing either a hot or cold restart of the automatic control equipment based on a result of the comparing.