During SPS 2025 in Nuremberg, Roeland Hagesteijn, managing director of PLCopen, delivered a clear message: open, vendor-neutral standards are essential to address the growing complexity of automation and the shortage of technical personnel. The Rocking Robots team spoke with him for this report from Nuremberg.
“PLCopen is a standardization organization, so we have nothing to sell,” he said. “We are a nonprofit organization, and together with our members – which are almost all the big players in industrial automation – we create specifications for programming a PLC.” Those specifications sit underneath a large part of today’s factory automation, particularly in motion control.
Training engineers on a common foundation
PLCopen’s motion control specification is widely adopted across different PLC brands. That directly supports the organisation’s core goal of interoperability. “If you know our trick, you can go and work for all these companies and all these factories,” Hagesteijn said. “You will not have to be retrained to learn new techniques and new programming methods.”
All PLCopen specifications are based on the IEC 61131-3 standard, which defines a limited set of programming languages and their structure. This gives engineers a consistent skillset independent of the vendor. “Once you know the PLC, you’ll know how it works in any factory in the world,” he said.
To strengthen that foundation, PLCopen released a new training guideline earlier this year that links its specifications more tightly to IEC 61131-3. “Everybody sees the threat of a lack of personnel or a lack of skilled personnel,” Hagesteijn noted. “Our training guideline will help solve a tiny piece of this puzzle by making sure we train the people in the right way.”
Entering the world of process automation
While PLCopen has long been strongest in discrete manufacturing, it is now expanding its efforts into process automation. Hagesteijn pointed to collaboration with the Open Process Automation Forum, a user-driven group involving major process control companies working on the Open Process Automation Standard.
“We are starting a new work group to build on what we have there and enhance the functionality of the standard,” he said. PLCopen’s role is to contribute PLC-related standardisation to a much larger initiative that aims to harmonise the entire process automation ecosystem.
New motion control release supports robot integration
For robotics specialists, Hagesteijn highlighted the latest update to the motion control portfolio. PLCopen has published a “release for comments” of the motion control Part 4 specification, which standardises communication between PLCs and robot controllers.
“We integrated the standard robot command interface,” he said. The goal is to remove the need for proprietary interfaces and to let traditional PLCs control complex robot movements reliably and consistently. “It enables a PLC controller – the old-fashioned PLC controller – to control robots and its complicated movements in automation.”
The draft specification can be downloaded from the PLCopen website. The organisation is inviting the global automation community to review and comment over the next three months. “Review it, give your comments, send it back to us,” Hagesteijn said. “That will make sure our product is the best we can deliver.”
Collaboration as the theme of SPS 2025
Asked about the main takeaway for SPS visitors, Hagesteijn pointed to a trend he sees across the industry. “Next to AI, which is the main topic everywhere, the main theme is collaboration,” he said. “No one company can do it all by themselves. We all need each other to find a way to do it together. Because on your own, you will never reach that future that we are longing for.”
By promoting shared, vendor-neutral standards across factory automation, robotics and now process automation, PLCopen aims to provide exactly the kind of collaborative foundation the industry needs.
