Next up: Wayne Manges, co-chair, SP100

Wayne Manges, co-chair of ISA's SP100 committee, presented an overview of all things wireless yesterday, and received great arousal from the end user community. This morning, Wayne is presenting an overview of S100. S100 is supposed to be a reliable, universal family of wireless standards, backed by ISA expertise, heritage and history. S100 is part of a standards family that goes back all the way to the original S50 4-20 mADC standards. S100 is about universality, the power of one. One of the key features of S100 is coexistence with other wireless networks. Wayne ran through his 30 years at Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL).  He showed an early adopter at Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant-- with wireless vibration sensors. Wireless in the industrial environment is a hard problem to solve, but there are very large ROIs to be made. Manges claimed he knew of a one-day ROI. Manges showed the ISA/Purdue hierarchical model and the wireless landscape grid we've often published in Control magazine. Cellphones, WiFi, WiMAX, Bluetooth, 802.15.4... and all the other alphabet soup of interacting standards concerned with wireless. "A viable approach needs to address all four issues: wireless, industrial, sensor, networks. If you can't talk to all four issues, you won't be able to produce viable wireless industrial sensor networks," Manges said. Balacing performance is critical to success, he said. Reliability, latency, throughput, security, are the "fab four," he went on. "We are even having difficulty defining these criteria," Manges said. "What sometimes people do is to put a wired and wireless sensor together and say, 'it is reliable because they agree.' This isn't reliability and it is not a good measure of it." There are many different metrics of security. Do any of them mean you are secure? "I don't know," Manges said. The new term, Manges said, for throughput is "goodput." You don't count anything but the good data. "We are leveraging huge defense and commercial wireless investments for industrial applications," Manges said.  Billions of $ from DOD  and the cellphone industry developed mesh and spread spectrum technologies, power issues, and security issues such as encryptions, physical layer security, and the integration of all of these issues. "ISA's standards process is consensus-driven," Manges said. There is chaos, but it can and will be managed. "It is a proven process, and we have a variety of methodologies to make it work." ISA100 efforts will result in standards, recommendations, and technical reports focused on assuring successful wireless deployments in industrial environments. ISA100 compliance will assure supplier specifications are conssitent and easy to interpret. User requirements are succinct, relevant and easy to interpret. Options are clear and easily differentiable. Probable outcomes are quantitatively evaluated against options. ISA100 is successs oriented. It will leverage ISA99, the cybersecurity standard, IEEE 1451 (the spart sensor) FIPS 140-2 security standars, ISO//OSI 7-layer model for network connectivity. ISA100 encourages new technology, deployment, communication among practitioners. "Balance is the key," Manges said. If the standard is too soft, everyone is compliant, nothing works, and nothing sells. If it is too hard, nobody can figure out how to use it. The first step is ISA100.11a. Right now you can buy non-standard products that have been promised to be upgraded later to the 11a standards. Near term: ISA100.11a will be released for process monitoring and "soft" control (>100 ms latency). Midterm: ISA100.11a adapted to other applications. This is ~late 2008. Long term: any manufacturing wireless applications. INTEROPERABILITY IS THE HOLY GRAIL! We are looking for a Universal Application Layer interface, defined early and allowing future development in lower layers. There will be multiple PHY layers-- we must provide the ability to have multiple radios. Special purpose layers must be provided, that are highly secure, highly reliable, and based on the ISA/ISO 7 layer model. Manges showed a picture of a wire rat's nest, with the caption "Wireless Wins! Just make it work!" "Who will lead? Who will follow? Who will sit around and whine?" Manges asked. Technology is ready-driven by cellular personal/business/DOD communications. The market is ready-- over $2000/ft for wires in some plants. Manges claimed EPRI is quoting $3000 but said EPRI won't put that in writing. ISA100 has over 400 members. We have partnerships, consortia, standars and collaborations. "Come and play!"