Technical Paper Abstract
Industrial plants increasingly host compute devices and software applications from many suppliers. Deploying, updating and observing those workloads across sites has become a lifecycle-management problem that existing field-device communication standards were never intended to solve. Margo™, an open collaboration hosted by the Linux Foundation, addresses that problem through an open standard, a reference implementation and a compliance testing toolkit for interoperable fleet management of edge applications and devices.
This paper argues that EtherNet/IP and Margo occupy different and complementary layers of the industrial stack. EtherNet/IP, with CIP, owns deterministic OT field-device communication and real-time cyclic process data, backed by conformance testing and proven multi-vendor interoperability. Margo owns the edge compute infrastructure layer: how applications are packaged, published, deployed onto heterogeneous edge devices and reconciled against a desired state.
Using four application scenarios — a virtual gateway, AI-based predictive maintenance, a virtual device and a virtual controller — the paper shows how Margo-managed workloads consume EtherNet/IP services without duplicating them. It closes by proposing four harmonization topics for an ODVA–Margo technical exchange: device and workload fleet management, firmware update, cybersecurity, and trust.
Keywords
EtherNet/IP, CIP, Margo, industrial edge, workload orchestration, fleet management, interoperability, software-defined automation
Paper and presentation from the 2026 ODVA Industry Conference & 24th Annual Meeting: to be published November 2
André Uhl, VP Architecture and Technology, Schneider Electric
Paul Brooks, Senior Manager Open Architecure, Rockwell Automation