The board of the independent non-profit organization UniversalAutomation.Org (UAO) has elected Spaniard Raquel Torres as its new president. The business economist and aeronautical engineer with international management experience succeeds John Conway, who had held the position since 2021, after he announced his retirement in May.
In the board elections, the positions of Greg Boucaud, chief marketing officer, and Sarat Kumar Reddy Molakaseema (Figure 1), chief architect officer, were also confirmed. The new management committee was also elected at the annual general meeting in Barcelona in May. The board of directors includes:
- James Lee, chairman, ASRock Industrial
- Whit McConnell, chief engineer, automation & process control, at ExxonMobil
- David McCall, senior director, industrial standards, at Intel
- Sølve Raaen, principal architect, Kongsberg Maritime
- Raquel Torres, chief ecosystem officer, Schneider Electric
- Amol Bhusari, business manager, digital integration, at Wood
- Vien Nguyen, principal software architect, Yokogawa.
Raquel Torres, who has now taken over the leadership of UniversalAutomation.Org, began her professional career as a stress engineer at CIE Automotive and subsequently worked for companies including Airbus Defence and Space, OSIsoft and Ontruck. After holding management positions at SAP and AVEVA, she joined Schneider Electric in 2023. Since the beginning of 2024, Torres has been vice president of the UniversalAutomation.org division. In addition to her new role as president, she also served as chief ecosystem officer for UAO.
“I am very pleased to be taking over the leadership of UniversalAutomation.Org,” said Raquel Torres upon her appointment. “If we wish to fully exploit the potential of digitalization, software and AI for a sustainable, competitive industry, then we need a manufacturer-neutral automation approach. We are making a decisive contribution to this by distributing our runtime technology. Therefore, one of my most important goals is to further accelerate the strong membership growth of the past few months.”
New avenues for automation
UniversalAutomation.Org has 91 members and is made up of manufacturers, OEMs, industrial companies and research institutions. These include representatives such as BASF, Cargill, ExxonMobil, Intel, Phoenix Contact, R. Stahl, Schneider Electric, HTW Berlin and JKU Linz. A non-profit organization, UAO manages, maintains and extends the reference implementation of a runtime execution engine based on the IEC 61499 standard, making this available to its members. As a vendor-neutral operating system, this runtime uncouples the manufacture-specific ties of hardware and development environments. It instead enables the re-use of software and have it run by different components from different manufacturers. As the lifecycles of hardware and software are uncoupled, migration and integration are simplified, and dependence on proprietary systems is reduced. The UAO approach is being used by various member companies, including Advantech, ASRock, BASF, Belden, Kongsberg Maritime, Phoenix Contact, R. Stahl, Schneider Electric and the Chiasso-based start-up Gr3n, which specializes in environment-friendly plastic recycling.
