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Soft­ware-Defined Automa­tion (SDA) Decou­ples Control Logic From Hard­ware

The Chal­lenge
We Tackled

Today’s indus­trial automa­tion envi­ron­ments are tightly bound to hard­ware and specific vendor ecosys­tems. This leads to long life­cycle lock-ins, poor scal­a­bility, and high main­te­nance costs. Soft­ware-defined approaches aim to break this depen­dency by decou­pling automa­tion work­loads from dedi­cated hard­ware, enabling flex­ible deploy­ment, scal­a­bility, and modern life­cycle manage­ment similar to IT.

Partic­i­pating
Members

Why this project
matters and for who

This project proves that indus­trial automa­tion can break free from hard­ware lock-in by running on a flex­ible, soft­ware-defined IT/OT stack.

Indus­trial automa­tion has long been tied to hard­ware, vendor-specific stacks, and rigid life­cy­cles. This has led to lock-in, high costs, and limited scal­a­bility. The project shows a different path. By decou­pling automa­tion work­loads from dedi­cated devices, soft­ware-defined automa­tion makes oper­a­tions as flex­ible and dynamic as modern IT. The Kuber­netes POC devel­oped within the OI4 commu­nity demon­strates how a full IT/OT stack can run across devel­op­ment, staging, and produc­tion envi­ron­ments with the same agility that cloud-native appli­ca­tions already achieve. Concepts such as hori­zontal scaling, container orches­tra­tion, and remote life­cycle manage­ment move from the IT world directly into automa­tion envi­ron­ments.

This matters for IT teams that can now apply proven cloud prac­tices in produc­tion settings, for OT special­ists who gain more flex­ible and secure control, and for produc­tion managers who can adapt resources without costly hard­ware replace­ments. Ulti­mately, manu­fac­turers reduce total cost of owner­ship while gaining the agility to meet new require­ments.

For the OI4 commu­nity, it is more than a proof of concept. It marks a turning point that shows how IT and OT can truly converge. What was once rigid and hard­ware-bound becomes a modern, soft­ware-driven envi­ron­ment that can adapt, scale, and evolve with busi­ness needs.

What we’ve
achieved

  • Estab­lished a demon­strator running container­ized work­loads on edge nodes managed via a central­ized cloud control plane.
  • Enabled remote manage­ment via APIs without direct network access.
  • Demon­strated failover capa­bil­i­ties between redun­dant devices.
  • Inte­grated OPC UA-based remote I/O instead of tradi­tional field­buses.
  • Success­fully migrated work­loads from staging to produc­tion envi­ron­ments to vali­date consis­tency.

#Better
together

This project shows what becomes possible when IT and OT experts work side by side. Within the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance, members combined their knowl­edge to build a Kuber­netes-based stack that runs seam­lessly from devel­op­ment to staging to produc­tion.

The value comes from collab­o­ra­tion. By pooling expe­ri­ence from different domains, the commu­nity created a working setup that no single vendor could have achieved on its own. Together they proved that soft­ware-defined automa­tion is not an abstract vision but a prac­tical path forward.

BEST OF ALL: We will have a follow up project! Stay tuned.

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