Engineering news
Two different parts of European consultancy group Altran have merged to form a company that will develop advanced controls for transport and energy applications.
Bath consultancy Praxis, which employs around 200 systems engineers, and software consultancy SC2 by Altran, which employs around 70 software engineers in the south of France have merged to form Altran Praxis.
The new company will seek to expand in the automotive and rail sectors first – the strongest sectors for SC2 and Praxis respectively prior to the merger. The company also expects to be active in other sectors, such as nuclear, medical, security and aerospace. Keith Williams, chief executive of Altran Praxis, said: “We can now offer an end to end solution, embracing new HMI [Human Machine Interface] technology.
For things like the connected car, cars which increasingly have lots of electronics, and communications systems, we can deal with all the technological and software issues.
“In lots of sectors, the abilities of HMIs are getting more sophisticated, but what they want to use them for is increasingly safety critical.
For example in the medical field, communications and robotics technology is making remote diagnoses and even surgery possible, he said. Control systems have to be able to cope with the criticality of the application. Another high stakes application is air traffic control, where increasingly the HMIs are gesture based touchscreens.
“Our business thrives on complexity novel and difficult problems. From an engineering development view with embedded systems you have a diverse set of disciplines to contend with.”
The Altran group employs around 18,000 people worldwide and is currently “consolidating” its activities, said Williams. Altran has owned Praxis since 1997, and bought SC2, formerly a part of the Continental automotive group, last year.