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.

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

Whit McConnell
Chief Engineer | Automation & Process Control at ExxonMobil

David McCall
Senior Director | Industrial Standards at Intel Corporation

Sølve Raaen
Principal Architect | Kongsberg Maritime

Raquel Torres
Chief Ecosystem Officer | Schneider Electric

Vien Nguyen
Principal Software Architect | Yokogawa

Amol Bhusari
Business Manager | Digital Integration at Wood

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.

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.

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

They joined us

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

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.

Andre Fritsch

Senior Product Manager

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

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.

Marco Zampolli

Industrial IoT Product Sales Director

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

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.

Sølve Raaen

Principal Architect OT

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.

Laurent Bacon

Head of Industrial Information and Control

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.

Raphael Xiong

Sales Manager

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!

David Campain

Global Product Manager, Process Control Systems

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.

Diego Bizzozero

Product solution specialist

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

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.

Jürgen Michielsen

Director Strategy and Platform modeling

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

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.

Nicholas Holland

Managing Director – EMEA Broad Market

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.

Jac Opmeer

Principal Automation Engineer at Shell

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.

Dmitrii Drozdov

Chief Technology Officer at Flexbridge

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.

Barbara Frei

Executive Vice President Industrial Automation