ISA’s SP100 committee merges working groups

ControlGlobal.com
11/20/2006

Wireless Systems for Automation, ISA’s SP100 standards committee, has announced the approval of a motion to merge two working groups. ISA SP100.11, covering industrial process measurement and control, and ISA SP100.14, which focuses on optimized solutions for industrial monitoring, will be combined into ISA SP100.11a, a new working group.

The committee unanimously approved the merger and work is already underway within the group. The committee is helding meetings and working sessions all week at ISA EXPO 2006.

“This marks the first step in the convergence of a number of proposed solutions that were presented to the committee at the Call for Proposal conference held at ISA in early September,” said ISA SP100 committee cochairman, Wayne Manges of Oak Ridge National Labs.

“We are all very encouraged by the similarity and compatibility of the ideas submitted for enabling us to move forward so rapidly towards a converged architecture for the standard. There is a wealth of industry experience within the committee and a desire among users and vendors to work toward an optimal solution that will satisfy user needs worldwide” added ISA SP100 committee cochairman, Richard Sanders of Exxon Mobil.

Cochairmen of the new working group will be Dan Sexton of GE Research and Pat Kinney of Kinney Consultants LLC. The scope of the consolidated effort will define the OSI layer specifications (e.g. PHY, DLL, etc), security specifications and management (including network and device configuration) specifications for wireless devices serving the Class 1 through 5 industrial environment, with some attention to Class 0 for fixed, portable and moving devices. It is the intent of this project to work toward a level of coexistence with other wireless devices anticipated in the industrial work space, such as 802.11x, 802.16x and cell phones. The group also intends to work to a level of interoperability with communication networks anticipated in the industrial work space, such as 802.3, 802.11x, 802.16x, HART and others.