Latest trends in machine communication

From 16 to 18 September 2025, the leading European community for software and hardware innovation gathered in Lisbon for the ITEA Project Outline Days. With almost 400 representatives from industry, research and politics in attendance, the PO Days are regarded as setting the pace for the next ITEA-funded research projects — and thus as the birthplace of the technologies that will shape the market in five to six years' time.

For Adept Engineering, however, this meeting place has always been more than just a mandatory appointment. It was here that the first ideas for the OPTIMUM project were conceived in 2019, leading to our current architecture for semantic OPC UA data models, which was awarded the ITEA Award of Excellence in 2022. Three years later, we returned with the same pioneering spirit.

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An old but reliable overhead crane still lifts loads weighing tons every day. His biggest deficit: He doesn't “talk” to the new, digitized processes in the production hall. Does that really mean that a completely new crane has to be purchased? No — says Dr. Arne Wall, co-founder of Adaept Engineering. In the latest Transformation Academy podcast, he explains how retrofitting not only avoids costly new purchases, but also becomes a real lever for sustainability.

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On September 26, 2025, more than 300 decision makers from politics, business and science met for the German-Latvian Business Day at HanseMesse Rostock. For Adaept Engineering, it was a home game with international appeal and an ideal stage to show how standardized machine data lay the foundation for joint innovations between Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Latvia.

While OPC UA has long been considered the backbone of modern automation in Industry 4.0, the integration of this technology into real microcontroller systems remains the exception. The reason for this lies in an unfortunate combination of severe resource limitations, high timing requirements, and the still limited availability of lean, fully standards-compliant implementations. Many developers therefore still resort to MQTT & Co. with less structured data formats as soon as RAM budgets in the single-digit megabyte range and clock frequencies below 250 MHz come into play.

We have redesigned our website. The aim was to present Adaept Engineering's services in a more modern way, to sharpen our communication and to present our range of services more comprehensively.

Industrial communication is in the midst of rapid change: With OPC UA (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture), a universal, vendor-independent standard is available that ensures seamless data exchange from the field level to the cloud. The focus is increasingly on the question of how OPC UA can also be implemented on small, resource-limited embedded devices to enable new IIoT applications and Industry 4.0 scenarios.