Open Control Systems Are Changing Industrial Automation
In a recent podcast discussion with Ken Crawford, Weidmuller’s senior director of automation, we talked about how the reliability and security of numerous open systems have helped these technologies gain a lot of attention in the manufacturing industries. However, many companies remain cautious about the use of open systems in industrial control operations.
The fact that many well-known companies, such as Weidmuller, support an open control systems approach and offer open system products is helping more manufacturers overcome their concerns about open systems use.
Crawford explained that the term “open control system” refers to “a platform that allows you to install publicly available applications to build a custom control solution to meet your requirements. Since you are using proven and widely adopted applications, you don’t need a huge design team to write your software from scratch. Plus, the public availability of these apps breaks any single-source dependencies — meaning you're not stuck with a single-source hardware and software vendor. This allows you to design, validate, build and test a solution in record time.”
Further helping to boost the use of open control systems in industry is the fact that many open platforms employ common industrial protocols like OPC UA, MQTT and Modbus, and all are supported by large developer-based communities.
Crawford also pointed out that the characteristics of open control systems stand in contrast to proprietary systems, which are “built on a copyrighted code base, making them a closed architecture that dissuades adoption of software outside the manufacturer’s ecosystem,” he said. “Closed systems also have a commercial model that requires continual investment to keep their internal design teams and technologies funded.”
At Automate 2025, Automation World connected with Jack Fillenwarth, senior software specialist at Weidmuller USA, to learn more about Weidmuller’s u-OS open control platform and how containerized apps are used for industrial control system applications.
In Weidmuller’s demo at the event using one of its u-Control M4000 controllers with u-OS running on it, Fillenwarth explained that u-OS is an app-based ecosystem that distinguishes it from a typical automation controller setup with only the PLC runtime installed.
On the M4000, “we have the PLC runtime installed with Codesys, but we also have remote I/O, u-link remote access, and ProCon-Web to analyze and control individual machines or a complete production flow,” he said. “So we have multiple applications running simultaneously on the same device. By containerizing these applications, it allows us to do more on the single device, and you can access all these applications just using a web browser and a connection to a PLC.”
In the video below, Jack Fillenwarth explains Weidmuller’s approach to open control systems, how these systems relate to the well-known Purdue Model for the segmentation and organization of industrial control system technologies, and how containers aid automation engineers in production operations.
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