Standards coming on enterprise control integration

ISA-95 standard the umbrella for WBF, OAGi collaboration

By Plant Engineering Staff September 12, 2007

OAGIS will be building

“We’ve been listening to customers’ needs for years, and the ISA-95 content is very important to all of the manufacturing end users I have spoken with,” said David Connelly, CEO of the Open Applications Group.”Our work to create these documents brings real solutions to the end user.”

The decision, made during a mid-August OAGi Manufacturing Working Group meeting involving representatives from IBM , Yokogawa , iBASEt , Boeing , Infor , ISA and WBF and others, reflects ongoing collaboration between ISA, WBF, and OAGi through the OpenO&M Initiative. The OpenO&M Initiative is a venture of ISA, MIMOSA , OAGi , OPC , and WBF, and supports development of business process models for data exchange between manufacturing operations management and business support systems.

The Open Applications Group is a not-for-profit open standards development organization building a standard called the Open Applications Group Integration Specification (OAGIS). The OAGIS standard covers data exchange requirements for business systems and applications, including manufacturing and operations management systems. The Open Applications Group Board of Directors voted earlier in the year to express the work of the ISA95 working group in OAGIS, providing the end user a world class XML solution based on the popular and respected standard.

“The documents that will come from our collaboration with ISA and WBF will be the industry guidelines that customers need,” said Gary Sullivan of iBASEt. “Harmonizing standards is important work, and the industry will benefit from this ongoing collaboration.”

With the new initiative, ISA-95 will remain the foundation for the documents with OAGIS and B2MML sharing each other’s extensions and collaborating on the standards. OAGi and WBF will sign a Memorandum of Understanding, and ISA and WBF will be invited to join the OAGi Partner Council when it is formed. OAGi will also have a representative on the ISA-95 committee.