UniversalAutomation.org

I joined UAO because by being open, by being an international standard, by being already supported by quite a certain number of relevant companies, it paves the way for a new generation of not just automation systems, but a new way of conceiving automation systems. Because in the end it leaves behind the problem of hardware and unleashes the power of software, which has not yet happened in automation.

We want to have an open system because our customers ask for it. It will also make our life much easier if there's only one product with one interface that basically works with every controller. You can run the application on our system. You can also use another system. You can mix and match different systems. So literally a part of the system can be installed here and the other part can be installed in Australia and it will work together. Most of our customers in process automation are pretty conservative, they never want to change a running system. But now, we see a new generation coming up that is used to new technologies. They are open to test and try these new functionalities and I think most of them pretty well understand the advantages on this. I'm doing this for 20 years now and I think over the years, this is the most exciting change.

We joined UAO because we strongly believe that we have to decouple the application from the hardware. The value of our automation is not in the hardware and (yet today) we design every plant in hardware-centric way.  That is no longer possible with the regional complexities of cyber security, more maintenance, more complex software requirements. On our current path towards Industry 4.0 that hardware-centric approach no longer good. So in short, we must decouple hardware & software to make sure that we are able to survive as an industry in Europe.

Advantech is growing really fast and I believe if you want to keep on growing in the future, you need to be able to innovate. And when I see the universal automation approach, it is exactly the way of innovation we need to go with. Who is inside Universal Automation? You have institutions, you have academics, you have OEMs, manufacturers and users. This means that you have all the voices of the market on one platform, no one is pushing in one direction. We are just finding the way to grow together to the next level. Universal Automation is really the concept you want to push today. In the past there was one piece of hardware with one task, but we have to move on, we have to evolve. The evolution is that the hardware can have different kinds of software and everything can run on top of it. The hardware itself is not so important anymore.

We operate several thousand third-party installations, so we find ourselves with a large volume of equipment from different brands. This requires great complexity of skills to maintain them. This is why the association’s approach interests us greatly: to simplify the multi-vendor complexity. Pooling the skills of our employees on a limited number of platforms is a guarantee of operational efficiency, and a vector of success for the dissemination of standards.

I like to have a system that is based on an open standard instead of a system that is defined by just one vendor. So for us, 61499 is one way of opening up our system and make it future ready and that's why we joined the UAO. Today there are a lot of obsolescence issues in in the industry so you can end up in a corner where it's hard to move out from. Instead, by using an open standard, you’re having the opportunity to select the best vendor. A standard is always good but it's even better to also have an implementation of a standard. And that’s exactly what UAO provides. It's not an open-source, but a guarded-source-community. And that's very important because then there is someone behind it to make sure that the quality of the software is good.

On our hydroelectric power plants, we have technology from the 1950s that we need to modernize it. UAO’s technology will allow us to decouple software from hardware and create portable libraries of functions to replicate across our assets, independent of the automation hardware. We want to completely change our approach, focusing on functions rather than hardware constraints. This functional approach from design to implementation is a revolution for us. Our automation teams were quickly impressed with this new approach and have understood it very quickly.

When we came to Universal Automation Organisation, they offered us a stable solution with the IEC 61499 standard as the future of open automation. This standard eliminates the need for code conversion. This means that customers can use only one programming for our PLCs on different machines. This also helps them to increase their efficiency, reduce their costs and run more stable machines. We are very optimistic about our cooperation with Universal Automation because there are so many different types of machines and PLCs in China, and it takes a lot of engineering to make different machines talk to each other. We joined this ecosystem to make every machine and PLC talk in one standard. In fact, we are the first local company in China to offer large scale IEC 61499 compliant hardware.

Open Automation technologies like UAO’s will allow us to deliver innovative automation systems faster and at lower cost.  That enables more efficient manufacturing and faster time to market for green solutions. We plan to starting using IEC 61499 to innovate on top of existing infrastructure and technology as our first use cases.  Longer term, more efficient integration of technology from different OEM machine and automation suppliers will have a major positive impact. To those considering joining UAO, don’t join if you like being locked into expensive proprietary PLC platforms and enjoy using the same old thing!

It's always important to make a step ahead and try to find something new. From my experience I see that there has been a big revolution in the IT for example and I expect the same in automation. In my opinion it's important to be part of the UAO in this stage because you can put in your ideas. We can collect ideas from a lot of people, everyone having different things in mind. It's very important to put together different ideas and go out with a new approach This approach is really a winning approach because it's very, very flexible. You develop the application once and you can reuse it in each different configuration.

Wood is excited to be part of defining the future of automation and transforming profitability and productivity for the customers in our industrial markets. UniversalAutomation.org technology will enable business innovation, increase digital adoption and agility with its open, interoperable and portable solutions- building business resiliency and empowering our clients to be future-ready.

For Belden, Universal Automation means two things. First, the opportunity to participate in the development of this open architecture and benefit from the common technology. Second, we are part of a great community that supports us with new ideas and best practices. A major advantage of Universal Automation is the scalability of a distributed architecture with multiple components, compared to a monolithic architecture that relies on a single component. The main advantage of UAO is that it is truly innovative, as opposed to the monolithic approaches that have been implemented in the past. It allows more code reuse and gives software developers used to object-oriented languages the opportunity to participate in the programming of automation systems.

We are excited to be part of UniversalAutomation.org because it promises to be a complete game changer. It opens up a new world of possibilities for organisations like ours. Unlocking valuable data currently buried in proprietary systems, making the connectivity and deployment of new technologies like Artificial Intelligence quick and simple. As part of UniversalAutomation.org we are actively collaborating with and supporting like-minded organisations to create an exciting new open era in operations and automation.

I think now is a great time to disrupt the industry, really become hardware agnostic and let the end user decide what hardware they want to use. Customers can basically choose the hardware they want using just one automation platform, so they become very versatile and are not bound to one particular vendor. Universal Automation provides precisely the level of flexibility that a competitive and sustainable industry requires. For our customers, this is exactly what they are looking for today.

We support UAO because it drives adoption of a standard implementation of IEC 61499. This technology enables the new way of programing we want to achieve. It enables built-in state-based control. It is not competing with OPAF, it is a great platform in operation real time control space, that can work seamlessly with other standard elements​.

The creation of UniversalAutomation.org is the dawn of a new era within automation technology; over the course of the next five years, it will create a sea change for the future of automation software development. We are delighted to be a part of UniversalAutomation.org, driving the development of a “plug and produce” system which will help the industry keep up with the increasing demands of flexible manufacturing. There is no doubt that as members continue to join the organization and reap the benefits of collaboration and openness, that industry-wide change will follow.

The change to Universal Automation is really enabling the industries of the future. Business data, coming from the automation level, is the foundation to make much more conscious decisions. Universal Automation is an ideal prerequisite for efficiently obtaining this data and performing valuable analyses. Universal Automation of course is much closer to the IT-thinking and therefore young talents are more attracted to work in this environment.