| Enterprise-control, batch standards Increasing use across multiple industries By Nicholas P. Sands, Manager, ISA Standards and Practice Board Manufacturers of all types are under increasing pressures to enhance efficiency, increase flexibility and cut costs – both for existing products and processes, and for new ventures. ISA-SP88 and ISA-SP95 are just two of the many industry standards groups that are developing solutions and removing the barriers that have existed among systems. Since its initial publication in 1995, the ISA-88 series of batch control standards has provided a common language to describe batch applications for users, consultants and vendors. The standards provide guidelines, structures and common terminology for defining batch processes. The ISA-88 series, which has been accepted and used in a growing number of manufacturing facilities, is undergoing revision and refinement to make the standards easier to implement in batch and, increasingly, non- batch applications. The ISA-95 series of standards on enterprise-control system integration helps to reduce the risks, costs and errors associated with implementing enterprise systems and manufacturing operations systems so that they easily integrate and interoperate. The standards may also be used to reduce the effort associated with implementing new product offerings. Microsoft Corp.'s announcement in 2005 of its support of the ISA-95 series as a key element in its plant-to-enterprise interoperability initiative, following a similar announcement of support by SAP, reflected the increasing recognition and use of the ISA-95 standards across manufacturing industries. ISA-88 and ISA-95 work together While the ISA-88 and ISA-95 standards complement each other well, the two ISA committees have formed a joint working group to assess areas of overlap and provide additional guidelines for users. ISA-88 may be thought of as a structure designed for engineers to organize and manage process cells in batch manufacturing. ISA-95 takes things further by allowing users to coordinate manufacturing facilities across process cells. “The ISA-95 piece sits above an ISA-88 system, tells it what processes to run, when to run them and how to coordinate the manufacturing processes,” said Dennis Brandl, president of BR&L Consulting and ISA-SP88 Committee Chair. A large number of manufacturing companies are mixed mode or hybrid operations. While ISA-88 addresses batch processing, ISA-95 has taken ISA-88's concepts and expanded them into areas of discrete and continuous manufacturing. “These standards work together to fully define best practices for mixed-mode manufacturing. ISA-95 focuses on enterprise integration, and ISA-88 focuses on the automation layer,” said ISA-SP95 Chair Keith Unger, principal manufacturing information technology consultant with Stone Technologies, Inc. The integrated work of ISA-88 and ISA-95 allows for consistency across batch, packaging and warehousing. “The result is better integration between software systems that are running batch and MES. The two don't currently integrate well, but by bringing a single set of requirements, we hope vendors will be able to address the problems of being partly manual and partly automated,” added Brandl. Latest developments The ISA-SP88 committee is currently working on Part 5 of the ISA-88 series, &# 8220;Modular Concepts for Automated Control Systems.” Its purpose is to define methods for developing a library of automation control components that can be supported by automation vendors for all types of manufacturing. The components specified will provide a base of commonly used automation functions that encourage modularity and define common methods for component interaction in batch, continuous and discrete manufacturing. The committee has also formed a working group to update the first two standards in the ISA-88 series. The update project will focus primarily on ANSI/ISA-88.01, &# 8220;Batch Control Part 1: Models and Terminology,” but will also consider revisions to ANSI/ISA88.00.02, “Batch Control Part 2: Data Structures and Guidelines for Languages.” “ISA-88 has not only become the worldwide-accepted standard for batch control systems, but has also been widely applied in areas outside of batch,” said Brandl. “This update project will clarify issues that have come up over the past several years in using the ISA-88 series.” The ISA-SP95 committee has just approved Part 5 of the ISA-95 series and will be closing out committee comments, making final revisions and submitting the document for approval as an American National Standard. The Part 5 standard, focusing on business-to-manufacturing transactions, extends the ISA-95 series by specifying the transactions to support the object models defined in the previously published ISA-95 Part 1 standard, “Models and Terminology,” and Part 2, “Object Models and Attributes.” For information on these and other ISA standards, visit www.isa.org/standards. Further extending the ISA standards A WBF (formerly World Batch Forum) working group has built an implementation of the ISA-95 standards based on XML business-to-manufacturing markup language (B2MML). “Numerous companies are implementing actual projects that tie their enterprise systems to manufacturing using that B2MML implementation of the ISA-95 standards, and that's significantly reducing the time it takes to integrate those solutions,” said Unger. In addition, the ISA-SP95 committee is playing a key role in a major multi- industry collaboration to develop a guideline that defines generic business process models between the operations management and business layers of manufacturing support systems. Other organizations participating in the Manufacturing Interoperability Guideline Working Group include WBF, MIMOSA, OAGi and OPC. The resulting guideline will also be applicable to process, discrete and mixed-mode manufacturers – reflecting a convergence of the manufacturing interoperability standards work underway within the respective groups and paving the way for development of reusable integration software components for manufacturing processes. For information on this industry initiative, visit www.isa.org/ mnfginterop.
Author Information | Nicholas Sands is a Chemical Solutions Process Technology Manager at DuPont. He is the Manager of ISA's Standards and Practice Board, an ISA Wilmington Section Volunteer, and a contributor to the new ISA Certified Automation Professional program. |
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