PCD3.W610 As one of the first industry pioneers to join the UAO, Schneider Electric has been committed to forging a new era of open collaboration, leveraging its expertise in digital transformation in energy management and automation to continue to drive the next generation of industrial automation.

The world of industrial operations is undergoing a radical transformation that needs to take advantage of cutting-edge technologies such as machine learning, augmented reality, real-time analytics, and the Internet of Things, as IT has, to deliver a step-change in performance, agility, and sustainability. However, closed and proprietary automation limits the widespread adoption of new technologies, slows the pace of innovation, impedes the integration of third-party components, and keeps upgrade and maintenance costs high. The shared runtime championed by Schneider Electric and UAO is changing all that.

The Open Automation organization UAO has more than 40 members, including four domestic organizations

Established in 2021, the UAO is an independent, non-profit association tPCD3.W610 hat promotes an industrial-grade reference implementation of the runtime based on the IEC61499 open standard by sharing source code. Its members include industrial and information manufacturers, integrators, end users and academic institutions, including Schneider Electric, and currently has more than 40 member units, including 4 domestic institutions.

Schneider Electric works with the UAO to promote standards, openness, and universality, to help members innovate and create interoperable solutions that drive sustainable and lasting positive change in our industry. This way of sharing code can ensure that the running time of the platform provided by all manufacturers is exactly the same, maximize the universality, consistency, compatibility and high quality of the software, greatly accelerate the development of products and market speed of manufacturers, and reduce the cost of user development and maintenance of applications.

Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure Open Automation platform, the first open automation system based on the UAO shared runtime launched by a member of the UAO organization, was iterated to V23.0 in Hannover this year. UAO also presented a series of products based on the UAO runtime in Hannover. By using a shared runtime based on the IEC61499 open standard, the software becomes a portable asset, enabling industrial control systems to be modeled and developed as a single integrated system, but also deployed as a distributed system, thereby reducing design and commissioning time, improving operational efficiency, increasing productivity, and doing “plug and play”.

UAO Asia Pacific Representative Wang Yong said: “The open automation that UAO promPCD3.W610 tes is a unified common platform that does not rely on specific hardware, which will greatly reduce engineering time and reduce the total cost of ownership for end users. The end user gains from adopting a common automation platform will greatly accelerate the development of the UAO platform. At present, three UAO members in China are developing products based on shared runtimes, and we look forward to more open automation products. The latest version of IEC 61499 has been transformed into a Chinese national standard and officially implemented in 2022, which will also promote the promotion and use of UAO.”