The board of the independent non-profit organization Universalautomation.org, or UAO for short, has appointed Raquel Torres from Spain as its new president. The business economist and aeronautical engineer with international management experience succeeds John Conway, who has held the position since 2021. Conway had already announced his retirement in May. Greg Boucaud (Chief Marketing Officer) and Sarat Kumar Reddy Molakaseema (Chief Architect Officer) were also confirmed in their positions in the Board elections.
The new Board of Directors was elected at the Annual General Meeting in Barcelona in May. The Board of Directors of Universalautomation.org now includes:
- James Lee, Chairman of AS-Rock Industrial
- Whit McConnell, Chief Engineer for Automation & Process Control at Exxon Mobil
- David McCall, Senior Director Industrial Standards at Intel
- Sølve Raaen, Principal Architect at Kongsberg Maritime
- Raquel Torres, Chief Ecosystem Officer at Schneider Electric
- Amol Bhusari, Business Manager for Digital Integration at Wood
- Vien Nguyen, Principal Software Architect at Yokogawa
Change of leadership at Universalautomation.org
Raquel Torres, who has now taken over the leadership of the organization, began her career as a stress engineer at CIE Automotive and subsequently worked for companies such as Airbus Defence and Space, OSI-Soft and Ontruck. After holding management positions at SAP and Aveva, she moved to Schneider Electric in 2023. Torres has been Vice President of Universal Automation there since the beginning of 2024. In addition to her new role as President, she also served as Chief Ecosystem Officer for UAO. "I am delighted to take over the leadership of Universalautomation.org," emphasizes Raquel Torres on the occasion of her appointment. "If we want to fully exploit the potential of digitalization, software and AI for a sustainable and competitive industry, we need a manufacturer-independent approach to automation. By spreading our runtime technology, we are making a decisive contribution to this. One of my most important goals is therefore to accelerate the strong membership growth of recent months even further."
New paths in automation
The organization now has 91 members. It is made up of industrial companies, manufacturers, OEMs and research institutes. These include well-known representatives such as BASF, Cargill, Exxon Mobil, Intel, Phoenix Contact, R. Stahl, Schneider Electric, HTW Berlin and the JKU Linz. As a non-profit organization, the UAO manages, maintains and expands the reference implementation of a Runtime Execution Engine based on the IEC 61499 standard and makes it available to its members. In the sense of a manufacturer-neutral operating system, this runtime means that hardware and development environment are no longer tied to a specific manufacturer. Instead, it is possible to reuse software and run it on different components from different manufacturers. As the lifecycles of hardware and software are thus also decoupled, migration and integration are considerably simplified and dependency on proprietary systems is reduced. The UAO approach is already being used successfully by various member companies, including Advantech, AS-Rock, BASF, Belden, Kongsberg Maritime, Phoenix Contact, R. Stahl, Schneider Electric and the start-up "Gr3n" from Chiasso, which specializes in environmentally friendly plastics recycling.
