from the department of "here's the real skinny on Wireless...."

March 19, 2007
Wayne Manges, from ORNL, the big kahuna of the SP100 committee, caused this to be sent to all SP100 members today: I know that all of you on the ISA-SP100 committee join me in wishing the best to those of our colleagues who are convening in Karlsruhe, Germany this week at the ISA-SP100.11a meetings. Under the able leadership of co-chairs Pat Kinney and Dan Sexton, I am confident that we will continue the progress that has been made over the past few months. And, I am pleased to announce tha...
Wayne Manges, from ORNL, the big kahuna of the SP100 committee, caused this to be sent to all SP100 members today: I know that all of you on the ISA-SP100 committee join me in wishing the best to those of our colleagues who are convening in Karlsruhe, Germany this week at the ISA-SP100.11a meetings. Under the able leadership of co-chairs Pat Kinney and Dan Sexton, I am confident that we will continue the progress that has been made over the past few months. And, I am pleased to announce that a recent decision by ISA to contract with Pat Kinney to serve as the lead editor for preparation of the draft ISA100.11a standard is expected to further enhance our progress and success. ISA is funding Pat to lead us in an aggressive timetable with writers for each proposed section of the standard identified by the end of March, and the initial detailed outline draft ready for ISA-SP100 leadership team review by the end of May. The document will undergo a revision cycle with a new draft available for discussion at ISA-SP100 meetings in late July, and the proposed standard is expected to release for ISA-SP100 committee ballot by 30 September. To meet this timetable, I believe that all members of ISA-SP100 need to focus on active contributions to the preparation and review of this draft document. Our working groups should focus their efforts in the next few months on the needs of the ISA100.11a document writing group and be prepared to contribute technical insights and reviews quickly when requested. We need to focus the efforts of the entire committee on writing this standard so we can meet our timetable for this document. We can resume our diverse efforts for development of future releases and other wireless applications in a few months after we achieve this initial success. The contributions of technology and knowledge from suppliers are proving to be an invaluable part of allowing us to move our work forward. Several companies have made significant technology and resource contributions throughout the initial stages of the standard committee's work. Likewise, the input from asset owners about their experiences and needs are critical to the work of our committee. The extensive use case data that we have collected over the past year provides a solid foundation on which we can merge user needs with practical technology solutions to achieve a useful standard. It is expected that the draft standard will offer a very robust, secure, and reliable solution for the targeted industrial market. The technologies that are expected to be embodied include; standard 2.4 GHz IEEE 802.15.4 radios for global deployment, frequency or channel hopping with meshing for increased reliability, and a single robust application layer interface for broad usability and interoperability in connecting to legacy plant systems. We expect that the technical options that we explore will evolve and change as we work on this draft. If we continually keep our goal in mind of making sure that this standard is the best possible standard for the users in the process and manufacturing communities, we'll be successful. Thank you for your cooperative and constructive spirit, and your continuing important contributions. Wayne