- December 02, 2018
- Research Triangle Park, North Carolina
In early November, the Geneva-based International Electrotechnical Commission held the first meeting of a new IEC systems committee on smart manufacturing in Frankfurt, Germany. An IEC systems committee is intended to set high-level interfaces and functional requirements that span multiple work areas across the IEC and its partner, the International Organization of Standardization (ISO), to achieve a coordinated standards development plan.
While major supplier and government organizations from across the globe were well represented at the Frankfurt meeting, participation from end users in industrial processing and manufacturing was noticeably low. However, ISA's long-standing focus in its consensus industry standards on end-user performance, safety, and security will be important in filling that void, as evident already in widely used IEC standards that are based on original ISA standards. These include ISA-99/IEC 62443, Industrial Automation & Control Systems Security; ISA-95/IEC 62264: Enterprise-Control System Integration; ISA-84/IEC 61511: Functional Safety; and ISA-18/IEC 62682: Management of Alarms.
ISA’s participation will be facilitated through an organizational liaison with the IEC by which ISA standards and technical reports, both published and in development, can be directly circulated and reviewed within the systems committee as appropriate.
For information on participating in ISA Standards or on the IEC Systems Committee on Smart Manufacturing, contact Charley Robinson, ISA Standards, crobinson@isa.org.
Have an idea for an ISA standard, book, training course, conference topic, or other product or service? Send it to: idea@isa.org .