Wireless standard organization conducts “plugfest” to test device interoperability
ISA100 Wireless Compliance Institute brings Honeywell, Yokogawa, Nivis, GE, Yamatake, Fuji Electric, and R3 Sensors devices to verify working interoperability.
The ISA100 Wireless Compliance Institute (WCI) announced the success of its recent "Wireless Plugfest" – a structured WCI member program conducted periodically to validate interoperability of wireless products compliant with the ISA100.11a standard. The event was held in December 2010, at National Technical Systems (NTS) labs in Los Angeles, CA. NTS is an independent third-party engineering, testing, and certification company.
The WCI Technical Steering Committee designed and planned this series of test scenarios to confirm interoperability characteristics in four functional categories; provisioning, networking, application configuration, and data publishing.
“We were thrilled with the outcome of the December 2010 WCI Wireless Plugfest and will expand the Plugfest program on an ongoing basis,” said Andre Ristaino, managing director of WCI. “Our objective is to improve the user experience with ISA100-based products and maintain confidence in our declaration of assured interoperability. As new ISA100.11a devices pass certification, we will expand our product testing scenarios to confirm the scalability, reliability, and performance benefits of the ISA100.11a standard.”
Test engineers successfully demonstrated interoperability of ISA100.11a-based manufacturer field devices, provisioning devices, and gateways. The test included registered devices submitted by suppliers including the Honeywell high-level analog input (HLAI) device, pressure and temperature devices, and Yokogowa pressure and temperature transmitters. Using a structured plan for assessing multiple combinations of network configurations, devices from participating suppliers were joined to gateways from Honeywell, Yokogawa, and Nivis, and then configured to publish data through those gateways.
“We were able to demonstrate the effectiveness of the WCI technical documentation and the interoperability of the ISA100.11a devices and profiles,” said Osman Sakr, CTO of National Technical Systems.
The ISA100.11a industrial wireless networking standard is the first in the ISA100 family of standards. This wireless mesh network protocol standard ensures that supplier companies will build interoperable wireless automation control products. As a result, ISA100.11a device suppliers are able to create, modify, optimize, and scale a wireless network quickly, cost-effectively, and seamlessly. Interoperability provides users the freedom to choose field devices from any supplier, that are simple to deploy, reliable in operation, and support future applications.
Edited by Peter Welander, pwelander(at)cfemedia.com
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