What is UAO?

UniversalAutomation.org is an independent, non-for-profit association managing the implementation of an industrial automation shared source runtime execution engine, based on the IEC 61499 standard.

This new level of shared technology provides the basis for an ecosystem of portable, interoperable, “plug and produce” solutions and creates an entirely new category within industrial automation. UniversalAutomation.org is open to new members looking to advance the world of automation.

UAO Playbook

Brief history

UniversalAutomation.org was officially established in November 2021 by 9 founding members representing both the user and vendor communities:

These visionaries initiated our journey, which has now expanded to more than 90 members, encompassing automation users, technology vendors, academics, institutions, and startups. Simultaneously, technology vendors members are introducing market offerings featuring the UAO runtime execution engine, thereby advancing the universal automation solutions market.

Board of Directors

James Lee
Chairman | ASRock Industrial Computer

Whit McConnell
Chief Engineer | Automation & Process Control at ExxonMobil

David McCall
Senior Director | Industrial Standards at Intel Corporation

Sølve Raaen
Principal Architect | Kongsberg Maritime

Sam Huang
Senior Vice President | Kyland Group

Agathe Lemaitre
Manager OT Integration | Novo Nordisk

Raquel Torres
Universal Automation Org VP | Schneider Electric

Amol Bhusari
Business Manager | Digital Integration at Wood

Vien Nguyen
Principal Software Architect | Yokogawa

 

Industry Leaders Found UniversalAutomation.org to Launch New Automation Era

Industrial leaders and pioneers have joined together to form UniversalAutomation.org (UAO) and advance the world of industrial automation.

For the first time, vendors, users and academics will share a common automation software layer across their automation technology regardless of brand. This technological collaboration is driving the development of an ecosystem of portable, interoperable, “plug and produce” solutions, creating an entirely new category of industrial automation.

Membership

Portability is already a reality in other market sectors

Portability is already a reality in other market sectors. For example, mobile applications are developed to run across different smartphone vendors, enabling rapid advances through collective innovation. Until now, the industrial world has worked differently, with closed proprietary architectures and hardware-dependent software.

UniversalAutomation.org will create a new era of openness and collaboration, decoupling software and hardware by sharing a reference runtime execution engine implementation of the IEC 61499 standard.

portability

Members are working together

Members are working together to develop and adopt the next generation of universal automation solutions by collectively incrementing a runtime execution engine following shared source principles. Improvements to the runtime are managed by UniversalAutomation.org and its members. Development of prioritized features will be financed by UniversalAutomation.org or contributed by members. Members will have access to the runtime and the ability to shape the next generation of automation.

This shared runtime execution engine approach not only accelerates the adoption of the technology; it also maximizes portability by standardizing on a common runtime platform. It is the technology enabler of the future world of plug and produce industrial automation apps.

UniversalAutomation.org is actively recruiting new members. All entities looking to help advance industrial automation are encouraged to join. 

Members

Industry advancement with interoperable automation software 

Adopting a common runtime execution engine, shared across vendors, will provide limitless opportunities for growth and modernization across industry. The ARC Advisory Group found this move could save the industrial market $30 billion each year, which is currently spent servicing and maintaining the installed base of proprietary systems alone.

UniversalAutomation.org members anticipate the adoption of this reference implementation-based approach to industrial automation to deliver a range of benefits, including: 

  • Portability and reuse of software components on different systems, improving return-on-investment for automation application software 
  • Greater Innovation through the faster integration of IT and OT technologies and systems, development of new business models, easier connectivity, and more flexible/modular production systems to meet rapidly changing market requirements
  • Hardware-independent software applications, that can be distributed to and interoperate across multi-vendor platforms
  • Extending the lifespan of existing industrial tools, devices and systems, and easier upgrading of systems reaching their end of life
  • Simplified training and skills (with teams only needing to learn one common system), making automation industry OT entry more accessible to IT professionals and the new generation of automation professionals
  • Increased reliability and reduced time to market using proven in use plug and produce software components available on AppStore-like platforms 

The creation of UniversalAutomation.org is the dawn of a new era within automation technology

Dmitrii Drozdov Chief Technology Officer at Flexbridge

Team
They joined us
As a teacher in Electrical Engineering, I believe it’s vital to expose students to future-ready technologies. Today’s hardware-centric automation limits flexibility and interoperability, making evolution costly and complex. In contrast, IEC 61499 enables software-centric, open automation that bridges OT and IT, supporting agile, data-driven industry needs. INSA Lyon joined UniversalAutomation.org to give students hands-on experience with this modern, interoperable approach.
Mady Guillemot
Professor and Researcher
Joining UniversalAutomation.org provides the collaborative and open ecosystem we have been looking for to advance industrial automation. With our work on IEC 61499 and the open-source project Eclipse 4diac, we aim to support the adoption of standards and technologies that enable seamless connectivity, data exchange, and innovation across industrial automation systems.
Dr. Alois Zoitl
Univ.-Prof. Johannes Kepler University Linz
At UFRN, joining Universal Automation reflects our commitment to advancing next-generation industrial automation. We see IEC 61499 as key to enabling openness and flexibility in industry, and our long-standing partnership with Smar strengthens this vision. Through this membership, we aim to drive innovation, connect academia with industry, and help shape the digital future.
André Maitelli
Professor
I joined UniversalAutomation.Org to be part of a vibrant community that fosters collaboration between academia and industry. UAO offers a unique platform for networking, learning from global experts, and sharing our research and technical insights to help shape the future of open automation. It’s an exciting opportunity to contribute to a movement that values openness, innovation, and collective progress.
Mohsen Yahyaei
Professor
At the University of León, the SUPPRESS Research Group focuses on automation, control, and advanced monitoring of industrial processes. We integrate IEC61499 into our curriculum and apply data-driven strategies and industrial cybersecurity in our research to support the future of Universal Automation.
Manuel Domínguez González
Director of the SUPPRESS research group
As a university, we’re committed to preparing the future workforce by aligning our curriculum with industry needs. Our courses, developed in collaboration with industry partners, blend cutting-edge theory with practical experience. With Universal Automation leading the next wave of industrial transformation through IT convergence and digitalization, our membership empowers us to stay at the forefront and drive this change in Australia.
Dr. Octavian Bass
Senior Lecturer – Electrical Engineering
Penguin Solutions is proud to support open, vendor-independent automation through UniversalAutomation.org. UAO’s open approach lets users choose the best hardware-software combinations, backed by reliable, secure platforms with virtualization and fault tolerance. Our membership helps businesses scale, innovate, and accelerate time to market across multi-vendor environments.
Rudy de Anda
Head of Strategic Alliances
There is a huge room for improvement on the way runtimes are managed and orchestrated today. By joining UAO we aim to contribute to make large runtime deployments more scalable and secure through modern Edge Management functions. Our participation in UAO represents another significant step in our commitment to delivering open and flexible solutions based on industry standards, enabling industrial organizations to innovate more rapidly and with reduced risk.
David Purón
CEO and Co-founder at Barbara
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.
Franco Cavadini
Chief Technical Officer
Our customers want open systems—and so do we. With IEC 61499, one interface works across all controllers, making integration easier and more flexible. You can mix systems across locations and they’ll still work together. While process automation has been conservative, a new tech-savvy generation is embracing change. After 20 years in the field, this is the most exciting shift I’ve seen.
Andre Fritsch
Senior Product Manager
We prefer systems built on open standards over vendor-locked solutions. IEC 61499 opens up our architecture and makes it future-ready, helping avoid obsolescence and giving us the freedom to choose the best vendors. UAO not only provides the standard—it delivers a robust implementation through a quality-driven, guarded-source community.
Sølve Raaen
Principal Architect OT
Open automation like UAO helps us deliver innovative systems faster and more affordably—boosting manufacturing efficiency and accelerating green solutions. We’re starting with IEC 61499 to build on existing tech, and long-term, better integration across OEMs will be transformative. If you’re tired of being locked into costly, outdated PLC platforms—UAO is the way forward.
David Campain
Global Product Manager, Process Control Systems
At our hydro plants, we’re modernizing technology from the 1950s. UAO’s IEC 61499 standard lets us decouple software from hardware and build reusable function libraries across assets. This shift to a function-first approach is a game-changer, and our teams quickly embraced it. We’re excited to unify diverse machines and PLCs under one standard.
Laurent Bacon
Head of Industrial Information and Control​
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.
German Carmona
Global President of Wood’s Digital Consulting business
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.
Valeriy Vyatkin
Professor of Electrical Engineering at Aalto University
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.
Michel Arroyo
Operations and Performance Director
UniversalAutomation.org marks a new era in automation technology, set to transform software development over the next five years. We’re proud to contribute to the “plug and produce” vision, supporting flexible manufacturing. As more members join and embrace collaboration and openness, industry-wide change is inevitable.
Dmitrii Drozdov
Chief Technology Officer at Flexbridge
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.
Dominic de Kerf
Plant Systems and Controls COE
Mady Guillemot
Dr. Alois Zoitl
André Maitelli
Mohsen Yahyaei
Manuel Domínguez González
Dr. Octavian Bass
Rudy de Anda
David Purón
Franco Cavadini
Andre Fritsch - R.Stahl
Sølve Raaen
Dave Campain
Laurent Bacon
German Carmona
Valeriy Vyatkin
Michel Arroyo - Veolia - Operations and Performance Director
Dimitrii Drozdov
Dominic de Kerf
  • ExxonMobil
  • TriSystems
  • IDA Process Control Technologies
  • Analog Devices
  • BASF
  • Bucher automation
  • Bilfinger
  • Schneider Electric
  • Inovance
  • KTL - Korea Testing Laboratory
  • JW
  • Cargill
  • The University of Warnwick
  • Bihl+Wiedemann
  • Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology - SIMTech
  • UFRN - Universidade Federal do Rio grande do norte
  • Onify
  • ODOT Automation
  • Indeff
  • ICT Group
  • Raster Industrial Automation
  • Hyundai
  • Isae-Supméca
  • RoviSys
  • Platinum Electrical Engineering
  • Laplace Control Solutions
  • Huazhong University of Science and Technology
  • Upstate Automation
  • ProFace
  • Postech - Pohang University of of Science and Technology
  • Unionscience Technology Group
  • Westcon
  • OpenEmbed
  • UFCG - Universidade Fedral de Campina Grande
  • INSA Lyon
  • The University of Queensland
  • HBLFA Francisco Josephinum
  • JKU
  • Universitat Jauime I
  • Mayer Electric
  • Flexbridge
  • GR3N
  • KPI Automation
  • ISAAC Engineering
  • Autodriver
  • Enterprise Automation
  • Crescent Electric
  • MatriBox
  • SUPSI
  • NMIS
  • Meisterschulen am Ostbahnhof
  • Universidad Nacional de Colombia
  • Institut Teknologi Bandung
  • Fare Ingénierie
  • AFRY
  • ASRock Industrial
  • Technical University of Kosice
  • ENG
  • Kyland
  • Arts et Métiers Institute of Technology
  • https://summit.com/
  • Master Systèmes
  • Honeywell
  • HWK München und Oberbayern
  • Taotech
  • Radical Ingenuity Group
  • Stahl
  • Morson Projects - Ematics
  • Armony System
  • Sciyon
  • Endress+Hauser
  • Kongsberg
  • Nottingham Trent University
  • AIMIRIM
  • Veolia
  • TenLink
  • eDF
  • Omron
  • BPX
  • FLSmidth
  • Accenture
  • Universidad Sevilla
  • ESME
  • Universidad de León
  • Cognex
  • AAC
  • University of Reims
  • Barbara
  • Graybar
  • Pontificia Universidad Javeriana
  • HNAC Technology
  • NeoDyne

News & Events

17.10.2025

Automating Well Barrier Tests with IEC 61499

30.09.2025

Rewrite the future of Automation – by UniversalAutomation.org

Innovation Summit North America 2025
30.09.2025

Innovation Summit North America 2025