ISA SP95, OPC Foundation, MIMOSA continue collaboration

Clearwater, FL—The Joint Working Group of the Instrumentation Systems and Automation Society's (ISA) SP95 Committee, MIMOSA open systems alliance for operations and maintenance, and OPC Foundation (OPC) recently met to enable enabling practical interoperability with each other and with other enterprise systems.

By Control Engineering Staff February 24, 2004

Clearwater, FL— The Instrumentation Systems and Automation Society ‘s (ISA) SP95 Committee, MIMOSA open systems alliance for operations and maintenance, and OPC Foundation (OPC) recently held the first meeting of their Joint Working Group (JWG). The organizations are seeking to simplify the development and integration of operations and maintenance systems, equipment and software, enabling practical interoperability with each other and with other enterprise systems. To support this objective, JWG will coordinate the standards under development by ISA SP95, MIMOSA and OPC.

The three organizations announced formation of their JWG in a press conference at ISA Expo 2003 in October 2003. In addition to establishing the organizational structure and protocols for JWG, the group developed a technical strategy, including objectives and deliverables.

‘I was amazed at the energy and enthusiasm generated during this initial meeting. The group was able to outline common goals and establish a base of understanding on how these standards will collaborate,’ says Keith Unger, ISA SP95 Committee’s chair. ‘The integrated efforts of all three organizations will result in vendors building products for superior open solutions addressing the needs of all of manufacturing.’

Tom Burke, OPC Foundation’s president, adds that, ‘I’m very excited about the collaboration and teamwork demonstrated at the JWG meeting. The team consists of vendors from OPC, MIMOSA and ISA SP95, and it quickly came to consensus on a strategy for interoperability. We’re rapidly unifying the terminology and models, and we will be providing documents and sample code to jump-start vendors’ adoption of the standards. JWG is focused on enabling vendors to build products that end-users will be able to deploy into open solutions for operations, maintenance, and beyond.’

‘I’m extremely pleased by the amount of progress we made at the first JWG meeting. Too frequently, organizations talk about collaboration, but fail to deliver useful and timely results, either by design or by default,’ says Alan Johnston, MIMOSA’s president. ‘We’re already seeing significant benefits from our continuing collaboration with OPC to enable the real-time enterprise in a variety of vertical industry sectors through our OpenO&M initiative. Collaborating with the ISA SP95 Committee in our new JWG is the obvious way to accelerate development and adoption of open standards applicable to the manufacturing sector.’

Costantino Pipero, JWG’s coordinator and Invensys Wonderware WSIG’s global solutions manager, adds that, ‘We’re doing this right because the technology is mature enough to address a screaming market demand for consistency, demand from users to bridge their operational islands, and demand from solutions providers to define and pinpoint customer requirements. And we want to do it fast.’

Control Engineering Daily News DeskJim Montague, news editorjmontague@reedbusiness.com