At the end of September, Milan became the meeting point for the open automation community. The UAO Global Summit 2026 brought together industrial vendors, academics and end users at the Hotel Domina Milano Fiera from September 29 to October 1.

Barbara, a member of UniversalAutomation.org, took part in it represented by its CEO David Purón and as a sponsor together with Aimirim.

The summit was organized by UniversalAutomation.org, and its format favored real conversations: one shared program, a networking dinner and a visit to a working plant. The agenda made the focus clear: open, software-defined automation, and what it takes to run it in production.

Open Automation Gets Practical

The standard at the center of the program was IEC 61499. What stood out was how many projects now build on it. Talks ranged from large control applications developed with the Eclipse 4diac IDE (Alois Zoitl, Johannes Kepler University) to component-based automation for electrolytic cells and the use of IEC 61499 in an algae growth process. Kongsberg Maritime and Yokogawa discussed its role in Open Process Automation.

Vendors framed the shift in similar terms. Schneider Electric's EVP Industrial Automation, Gwenaelle Huet, presented "Open by Design: Schneider Electric's Path to Scale Software-Defined Automation", a sign of the company's commitment to UAO and its mission. She spoke about the need to build innovative ecosystems and about the acceleration of both UAO and Schneider Electric's open automation business, with a growing number of members and customers respectively.

Industrial AI Meets the Control Layer

AI appeared across the three days, always tied to the automation stack. Adrien Geymond (Schneider Electric) showed in "AI in EAE: Accelerating Design and Empowering Teams" how public AI models can be used to develop an IEC 61499 application with EcoStruxure Automation Expert (EAE). Valeriy Vyatkin (Aalto University) presented the agentic generation of IEC 61499 applications, and ASRock introduced an AI copilot for automation engineering.

IT-OT Integration Reaches the Plant Floor

The other trend we followed closely was the convergence of IT and OT. AWS presented proofs of concept with manufacturing companies under the title Software-Defined Automation Meets the Cloud. It is a useful signal: the cloud conversation is now about concrete pilots with manufacturers, not about architecture slides.

Where Real Plants Come In

The second day left the conference room. Attendees visited GR3N, a recycling plant on Lake Como that uses microwave-assisted depolymerization and applies Universal Automation and Open Process Automation at industrial scale.

During the visit, Barbara and AnyLog took part in the talk explaining what we are doing together with GR3N. AnyLog connects to the equipment of each process cell over Modbus TCP/IP, while GR3N uses Barbara to deploy and operate the software on top. The result is a deployment of more than 500 software containers across several locations, where a single configuration error or a missed patch can undo the return on investment.

It was a reminder that these ideas already run in chemical processes.

The summit closed with a focus on talent, from training awards for instructors to the launch of the UAO working groups.

What We Took Away

For Barbara, the summit confirmed a direction we see with our customers. As automation becomes software-defined and open, the question moves from "what runs on the controller" to "how do you deploy, update and secure that software across many sites". That is the layer Barbara provides, and it is why we are part of the UAO community, and why partnerships, collaborations and pilots with this community make sense for us.

Thanks to the organizers, especially Greg Boucaud, Beata Briss and Šejla Trakić.

More to come from UAO soon.