Soft­ware-Defined Automa­tion in Action: From Project to Live Demon­strator

From September 9–11, the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance took the stage at the Contain­er­Days Confer­ence Hamburg 2025 to show­case the live demon­strator of its Soft­ware-Defined Automa­tion (SDA) project. The event (see Contain­er­Days Confer­ence) provided the perfect stage to demon­strate how SDA bridges the gap between tradi­tional OT and modern IT concepts like containers, cloud, and edge computing.

The project Soft­ware-Defined Automa­tion (SDA) aims to decouple automa­tion work­loads from dedi­cated hard­ware, creating flex­i­bility, scal­a­bility, and modern life­cycle manage­ment in indus­trial automa­tion envi­ron­ments.

• Instead of relying on hard­ware-bound control systems, SDA intro­duces a container-based IT/OT stack built on stan­dard inter­faces.

• Key achieve­ments include container­ized work­loads on indus­trial edge devices, remote manage­ment via APIs, failover mech­a­nisms, and the use of OPC UA-based remote I/O replacing legacy fieldbus systems.

At the Contain­er­Days Confer­ence in Hamburg 2025, the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance show­cased its Soft­ware Defined Automa­tion demon­strator live on stage, high­lighting how indus­trial automa­tion can move beyond rigid hard­ware setups into flex­ible, scal­able and IT-driven envi­ron­ments. The demon­stra­tion made clear how container­ized work­loads, edge deploy­ment and remote life­cycle manage­ment can trans­form produc­tion by reducing lock-ins, enabling faster adap­ta­tion and lowering overall costs while creating a new bridge between OT and IT.