Vision to Decouple Hardware and Software in the Automation Market

  Overview

In a Smart City podcast hosted at the 27th ARC Industry Leadership Forum, Jim Frazer of ARC Advisory Group and Greg Boucaud, Chief Marketing Officer, UniversalAutomation.Org spoke about the industry consortium of technology suppliers and end users working to advance the vision of industrial automation application portability and interoperability across multi-vendor platforms.

UniversalAutomation.Org, started in November 2021, is an independent, not-for-profit consortium managing the implementation of a runtime execution engine, based on the IEC 61499 standard and a shared source business model. This new level of shared technology provides the basis for an ecosystem of “plug and produce” solutions and creates an entirely new category within industrial automation. Even in today’s world of standard programming languages, environments and platforms, automation application portability across supplier platforms remains severely limited. UniversalAutomation's vision is to create a standard software runtime environment and API that enables automation applications to run on any vendor’s hardware. This Insight captures the highlights of the podcast, which can be seen on YouTube.

Need to Decouple Hardware from Software

Greg explained that the goal and vision of this consortium is to decouple hardware from software in the automation space. Today, automation applications are programmed by using one supplier’s software tools and the resulting executable only runs on the supplier’s equipment and cannot be run on any other supplier’s platform. In the IT space, standards such as Windows, Docker, and Linux enable applications to be installed and execute on many devices and computers regardless of the supplier. “But that is not happening in the automation market and that is what we want to change,” said Greg. So, end users, system integrators, OEMs, process OEMs, universities, and startup groups together created this universal automation consortium. UniversalAutomation.Org is the realization of the concept of a universal or common automation software runtime environment, which is one step further than common APIs for interoperability.

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Keywords: UniversalAutomation.Org, Hardware, Software, Portability, Shared Source, Interoperability, Multi-vendor Platforms, API, ARC Advisory Group.