ISA Merges Industrial Wireless Groups

Wireless Systems for Automation, ISA”s SP100 standards committee, approved a motion to merge two working groups. ISA SP100.11, which covers industrial process measurement and control, and ISA SP100.14, which focuses on optimized solutions for industrial monitoring, will be combined into ISA SP100.11a, a new working group.

The committee unanimously approved the merger and work is already underway within the group. The new working group held meetings and working sessions last month at ISA Expo.

“This marks the first step in the convergence of a number of proposed solutions that were presented to the committee at the Call for Proposal conference held at ISA in early September,” said ISA SP100 committee co-chair Wayne Manges of Oak Ridge National Labs, in a prepared statement.

Co-chairs of the new working group will be Dan Sexton of GE Research and Pat Kinney of Kinney Consultants LLC. The scope of the consolidated effort will define the OSI layer specifications (e.g. PHY, DLL, etc), security specifications, and management (including network and device configuration) specifications for wireless devices serving the Class 1 through 5 industrial environment with some attention to Class 0 for fixed, portable, and moving devices. It is the intent of this project to work toward a level of coexistence with other wireless devices anticipated in the industrial work space, such as 802.11x, 802.16x, cell phones, etc. The group also intends to work to a level of interoperability with communication networks anticipated in the industrial work space, such as 802.3, 802.11x, 802.16x, HART, and others.