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New standards convergence subcommittee

The ISA100 standards committee has created a subcommittee to address options for convergence of the ISA100.11a and WirelessHART standards.

This initiative is a key step in the mission of the ISA100 committee to develop a family of universal industrial wireless standards designed to satisfy the needs of end users across a variety of applications.

The subcommittee will contrast and compare the technology within the ISA100.11a and WirelessHART standards, building on the experiences gained with industrial applications of both standards, with an ultimate goal of merging the best of both standards into a single converged subsequent release of the ISA standard.

“This is an important development for industry since it furthers the mission of ISA100 to embrace relevant industrial wireless standards and serves the expressed needs of the end-user community,” said Paul Sereiko of Airsprite, who has been invited, along with Dick Caro of CMC Associates, to serve as co-chairs of the new subcommittee.

“On behalf of end-users, I believe I can safely state that our ultimate goal is to have a single industry standard for process applications. We are pleased that a path is developing to achieve that goal and that interim steps for achieving interoperable practical experience with both standards have been identified,“ said ISA100 End User Working Group co-chair Jim Reizner of Procter and Gamble who led a team of end users, including Pat Schweitzer of ExxonMobil, Herman Storey of Shell Global Solutions, and others, which stimulated the formation of the subcommittee.

Also, the ISA100.11a Working Group, a working group within the ISA100 Committee, recently completed its first letter ballot on its draft standard, the first in the ISA100 universal family of wireless standards.

The ballot opened on Monday, 5 May, and closed on Tuesday, 3 June, with over 2,000 comments received on the document.

“This draft standard reflects a collaborative effort between end users and vendors on the ISA100.11a Working Group, and that’s what makes this standard relevant,” said Jim Reizner, Section Head, Corporate Engineering, Procter & Gamble, and co-chair of the ISA100 Users Working Group. “The end user community will benefit from the ISA100.11a standard once it’s approved, and we’re on our way to making that happen.”

The ISA100.11a standard is designed to provide a wireless industrial process automation network to address control, alerting, and monitoring applications plant-wide. The standard focuses on battery powered field devices with the ability to scale to large installations. It addresses wireless infrastructure, interfaces to legacy host applications plus security, and network management requirements in a functionally scalable manner.

“We’re thrilled to have released the draft standard for letter ballot,” said ISA100 co-chair Patrick Schweitzer of ExxonMobil Research and Engineering. “The ISA100.11a contributors have worked very hard to develop an open standard that’s simple for users to implement and deploy. This is an important first step in a thorough approval process outlined in ISA guidelines. We look forward to input from the working group members to ensure a clear, concise, effective standard for end users and suppliers around the world.”

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