Actemium is new member of UniversalAutomation.Org

The topic of "vendor-independent automation" continues to gain momentum. With Actemium, a full-service provider for industrial process solutions, the independent non-profit organisation UniversalAutomation.Org has gained a notable addition shortly after its founding. Built as an agile network of over 400 business units, VINCI Energies' Actemium brand offers customised service and technology solutions for the design, implementation and maintenance of industrial plants. The background to joining UniversalAutomation.Org is Actemium's intention to play an active role in shaping a new vendor-independent and software-centric approach to automation from the outset.

Jürgen Knörrich, Director Innovation Germany at Actemium:
"We are looking forward to joining forces with UniversalAutomation.Org to lead the way into a new era of industrial automation," says Jürgen Knörrich, Director Innovation Germany at Actemium. "Although the architectures currently prevalent in industry have brought us a long way, in order to be able to fully exploit the potential of Industry 4.0 in terms of flexibility, efficiency and networking in the world of automation, we now need an approach in which the interoperability of control components and the portability of software applications are standard. For us as a full-service provider, but also for our customers in the various industrial sectors, manufacturer-independent automation logics offer enormous advantages - both in terms of faster and simplified engineering and completely new sales markets."

A new logic for automation
UniversalAutomation.Org started its work at the beginning of November. As a non-profit organisation, it manages, maintains and expands the reference implementation of a runtime environment based on the IEC 61499 standard. The aim is to create an easily accessible technical basis for the establishment of manufacturer-independent and software-centred automation.
A characteristic feature of the resulting new automation logic is the decoupling of software and hardware. Through the use of a common runtime environment, which is implemented by the members of UniversalAutomation.Org in their mechatronic components, it is now completely irrelevant for the engineering of automated systems which hardware from which manufacturer is used in a machine. The result: in addition to a previously unheard-of degree of engineering freedom, a whole new market for software-based automation components is also emerging. As if from a kind of app store, prefabricated and tested software applications can simply be downloaded there and inserted into existing or planned plants by plug-and-produce. Similar to the IT world, the software applications acquired in this way run on practically any compatible hardware.