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At ARC Advisory Group’s 22nd India Forum (July 10-11, 2024) titled Accelerate Transformation in the Age of AI, Open Automation, and Sustainability, UniversalAutomation.org participated as a Global Sponsor. The thrust of the presentation by Dheeraj Bareja, Director Partner Business Development, UniversalAutomation.org was on unleashing innovation by software-defined universal automation (SDA). He highlighted the benefits and challenges that SDA addresses in the current industrial landscape; and emphasized the need for vendor-independent, portable, and reusable software to overcome the limitations of traditional hardware-defined systems. This blog captures the key points of his presentation. The entire presentation is available right here.
Why Software-Defined Automation?
Dheeraj began his presentation by answering the question as to why the focus is on software-defined automation and not on hardware-defined automation. Traditional automation systems face challenges such as high costs, innovation barriers, and difficulties in attracting young talent due to their reliance on hardware-defined solutions. When a fundamental review of any next-generation software is done, customers express the following challenges and pain points:
Innovation barrier: Digitization strategy is stalled because of the high cost to get data from existing controllers.
Software reuse: When the hardware reaches its end of life, the application software has to be rewritten.
Managing multiple suppliers: Maintenance teams have to learn multiple software tools, resulting in higher MTTR (mean time to repair). Moreover, as technology advances so rapidly a newly installed system becomes a “legacy” system after a few years.
Attracting talent: Difficult to attract talented young software engineers.
Also, the hardware suppliers are tightly coupled with the software which they are supplying; and this reduces the overall innovation capability. There is a growing demand for hybrid control architectures that can manage applications both at the edge and in the cloud, appealing to the younger generation of engineers.
Evolving to the Next Step
Automation systems must become more software defined and evolve to the next stage. The features needed to make the next-generation software can be seen in the graphic below:
History and Formation of UniversalAutomation.org
In 2017, Schneider Electric acquired NXT Control from Austria. In less than a month they ported the runtime component on different controllers within the Schneider Electric family; and this could be controlled by a single software. Soon this concept was introduced to the market, leading to the creation of an ecosystem involving various stakeholders. Thus, was born UniversalAutomation.org in 2021 with 9 founding members.
Further, Dheeraj spoke about the missing link for software-defined automation. In this context he spoke about the IEC 61499 standard, an event-driven language, which is a key technical enabler for UniversalAutomation.org, addressing limitations of previous standards and supporting software portability and interoperability. The common automation layer is a shared source code of the UA Runtime. “That's the magic glue, which converts these different controllers coming from different hardware suppliers to speak the same language,” explained Dheeraj. This is managed by the ecosystem of all stakeholders – vendors, end users, academics and so on.
Practical Applications and Growth
UniversalAutomation.org has grown significantly since its inception, with numerous practical applications and partnerships demonstrating its viability and benefits:
Maximize application portability across vendor platforms.
Remove issues linked to interpretation of written standard.
Release universal automation offers in months rather than years.
From 9, the membership of UAO has burgeoned to 90, and this number is likely to grow by the end of this year. Dheeraj spoke about the 10 testbeds and field trials for open automation. He reiterated that UAO is an accelerator of other open standards and that OPAF (Open Process Automation Forum) is a partner, not a competitor. Collaboration fuels industrial growth.