Toggle Engineering and CSI partner on Open Process Automation in Europe

25 September 2026 · Thomas De Kelver

On 18 September 2026, Toggle Engineering and Collaborative Systems Integration (CSI) announced a five-year exclusive partnership to deliver Open Process Automation (OPA) projects in Europe [1]. CSI is an OPA consultancy and system integrator based in Austin, Texas, and a co-founding member of the Coalition for Open Process Automation (COPA) [1][2].

This post covers what was agreed and what OPA is.

What was agreed

• CSI is Toggle’s preferred OPA infrastructure provider for European client projects.
• Toggle is a primary channel for OPA adoption with its European clients.
• Projects can use CSI’s OPA LaunchPad, a platform that shows what an OPA system can do before a client commits, and a portable process-control library written in IEC 61131-3 (the standard for PLC programming languages).
• CSI commits to at least five years of platform support after each project is delivered.

With the second-line support of CSI, Toggle’s role is the engineering around the platform, starting in the FEED (front-end engineering design) phase of greenfield and brownfield projects [1]. Toggle keeps full freedom over hardware selection, I/O, instrumentation and application engineering. CSI provides the OPA platform layer [3].

What Open Process Automation is

A traditional distributed control system (DCS) comes from one vendor: controllers, I/O, network, engineering software and operator stations. Once it is installed, upgrades, spare parts and extensions all go through that vendor.

Open Process Automation takes a different approach. The control system is built from components by different suppliers that connect through open, standard interfaces. The reference for this is the O-PAS™ Standard (Open Process Automation Standard), developed by the Open Process Automation Forum (OPAF) of The Open Group.

O-PAS reuses existing standards where it can instead of writing new ones, for example:

• OPC UA for communication between components
• IEC 62443 for security
• DMTF Redfish for systems management

The aim is that an end user can combine products from several suppliers and replace or upgrade parts of the system without replacing all of it.

Today’s status

O-PAS version 1.0 was published in 2019. Since then the standard has had several releases:

• Version 2.0 (February 2020): configuration portability. Moving control strategies between components from different vendors, to reduce engineering costs.
• Version 2.1 (May 2021): information model and testing. Wider configuration capabilities, and the groundwork for the O-PAS conformance certification program.
• Version 3.0 (2024): application portability and orchestration. Moving software applications between platforms, hardware interface specifications such as I/O services on Distributed Control Nodes (DCNs), and standardized system orchestration.

Independent certification of products started in October 2024, beginning with the Connectivity Framework and Global Discovery Server profiles [4].

OPA is still emerging. In our view, the useful question for most operators today is where it fits in the next greenfield project or DCS migration, not whether to replace a system that is running well.

Why

Over the last 20 years we have seen how the choice of control architecture constrains an operator for the next 20 to 30 years. OPA removes that constraint. Our goal is to help EPCs and end users adopt it with confidence, and working with a team whose founders helped define the standard gives us a solid base to do that [1].

Two more reasons matter to us. Development in OT is moving faster every year, so an automation system has to be open at its core, not only at the edge where it exchanges data with other systems. And cybersecurity threats keep increasing. An OPA platform is built on a zero-trust network design, in which no device or connection is trusted just because it sits inside the plant network.

If you are planning a new plant or a DCS migration in Europe and want to discuss whether OPA fits, write to us at Hello@Toggle-Engineering.com.

References

1. CSI and Toggle Engineering announce exclusive European OPA platform partnership. CSI, 18 September 2026. https://csi-automation.com/news/csi-toggle-european-opa-partnership/
2. Collaborative Systems Integration. CSI website. Retrieved September 2026. https://csi-automation.com/
3. CSI and Toggle Engineering announce exclusive European OPA platform partnership. Trevor Cusworth, LinkedIn, September 2026. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/trevorcusworth_csi-and-toggle-engineering-announce-exclusive-activity-7506722316676931584-0fyl
4. OPAF Announces New Certification Program in the O-PAS™ Standard. The Open Group, 1 October 2024. https://www.opengroup.org/The-Open-Group-Open-Process-Automation-Forum-Announces-New-Certification-Program-in-the-OPAS-Standard