Somehow in keeping with the fact that the automation entry won the Busch Nascar race yesterday, Dennis Brandl, Charlotta Johnson and Keith Unger dressed in racing nomex, gave updates direct from the track, and made pleas for more pit crew. Brandl is Chair of SP88 and the JWG, Unger is Chair of SP95, and Johnson is Vice Chair of SP95.
After several changes in direction, S88 part 4 is now complete, and passed ballot in February 2006. The last comments are shortly to be resolved, and the final version of Part 4 is to be issued later this month. There has been, Brandl noted, significant end user involvement and interest. The WBF's Batch ML (Batch markup language) is to be extended, and work will begin next week.
The WBF's Make2Pack effort will become the new baseline for ISA 88 Part 5. The committee is looking for more volunteers to participate, and a formal call to participate will be sent shortly. Consider this a heads-up (Editor's note).
ANSI requires that ISA reaffirm standards every 10 years, and now it is time for reaffirmation of S88 Parts 1 and 2. The committee would like to update Part 1 and 2 based on the past ten years' experience. This may include more, or clearer, definitions of the equipment modules and control modules, a clarification of the types of control defined (coordination, procedural, and basic) and where they fit into the equipment modules and updates on the activity model to clarify alignment with the ISA95 Part 3 Production Operations Management module.
And speaking of S95, Part 1 is due for an update in models and terminology, with changes resulting from the work in creating parts 2, 3 and 5, and the changes that resulted form the IEC/ISO work. There will be some maintenance changes also needed in Part 2, mostly object model attributes.
In the summer of last year, Part 3 was approved as an ANSI/ISA Standard, and is now in process as IEC/ISO 62264 Part 3. Part 4 is still work in process, and Part 5, the B2M Transactions module, is near completion. Part 6 is not yet started.
Part 5 has now had a good review period, and there have been major simplifications in noun/verb transactions, and there has been a clarification of nouns (Part 5) v. objects (models) v. components (OAGiS). The results of the meeting last week at ISA are that there is now a draft for a new vote in the Fall.
The ISA SP95 Part 4/B2MML Update
The common model approach: A high speed crash or a new track record for standards? Part 4 adds operations management activities to part 1 and 2 production focus, with additional focus on quality, maintenance and inventory. There has been a lot of end user and vendor feedback.
OAGi and ISA95 announced intention to converge standards
Operating under the Open Operations and Maintenance Initiative are the OPC Foundation, OAGi, MIMOSA, WBF, ISA-95, ISA-88, working to converge the leading standards in the business operations space. ISA SP88 and SP95 JWG is working on a technical report that will clarify the relationship between the two standards, and will provide additional definitions to aid in understanding how the two standards can be applied together.
From the international racing circuit, reporter Charlotta Johnson proclaimed that IEC62264-1 and -2 are now available as the international standard version of S95. -3 is out for vote, and -5 is a new work item. -4 has not been made available yet.
Significant work, according to Dennis Brandl, has been finished, and now it is the WBF XML Working Group's turn. New work on S88 part 5, s95 part 4 and s88 part 1&2 upgrades will need new volunteers, so please step up.
Then, with no race fanfare at all, Bryan Singer (who did not know about Rockwell #20 car's victory last night) gave a detailed summary of the work of the S99 committee on Automation Security. He noted that the best explanation for the way the committee is proceding is analogous to the SIL concept used by S84 for Process Safety Ssytems...in other words, because of the differences in the way IT and Plant Floor IT (see "The Operations v. IT War" in the upcoming March issue of CONTROL) see the security objective, it is going to be imperative to adopt the concept of "shielding" instead of fixit patches and automatic updates. He noted that the Federal Government is treating all automation issues as a subset of SCADA topics, which has its own difficulties.
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