ISA Wireless Network Standard Makes Progress

The ISA100 Committee of the Instrumentation, Systems and Automation Society (ISA) has released two news items marking significant progress toward the adoption of a standard. The first letter ballot of the ISA100.11a Working Group is underway. The ballot opened on Monday, May 5, and will close on Tuesday, June 3. ISA100.11a Working Group members may vote on the ballot, and may provide editorial or technical comments.

“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 Co., in Cincinnati, 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.”

“We're thrilled to release the draft standard for letter ballot,” said ISA100 co-chair Patrick Schweitzer, of ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Co., Fairfax, Va. “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.”

HART convergence

The ISA100 standards committee on wireless systems for automation has also created a new 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.

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.