WIRELESS WORLD REVIEW

Waiting For a Standard

I'm writing this while on a trip to Phoenix to attend the Honeywell Users Group Symposium. It's interesting, because Honeywell Process Solutions is often portrayed as the main antagonist to Emerson Process Management in the ISA100 wireless networking standard development process.

This standard under development by a committee of the Instrumentation, Systems and Automation Society (ISA) will define many of the technologies necessary for a safe and secure wireless application in industry. The process sometimes spills over into the press—something that is regrettable. Standards making is a messy process best done in the background until consensus begins to form.

On the plane from Houston to Phoenix, I happened to sit beside an engineer for a large petroleum company. When I asked about wireless adoption, he said he was waiting for a standard. During informal conversations here in Phoenix, I've heard that refrain repeated. Both HPS President Jack Bolick and Wireless Product Manager Jeff Becker expressed confidence that the first of a proposed family of standards—ISA100.11a, wireless sensor networks—would be adopted this year. That is good news. Even with the adoption of WirelessHart, the industry needs this ISA standard to move forward. I continue to believe that wireless technologies will be game changing in the way plants are run... Read more

Radio News: What's In a Standard? - Everyone likes a good technical standard. But they tend to like it only when it is done, and there are plenty of competitive products that meet the standard.

What is not lovable is a standard that is a-building, when controversy clouds the issues, arguments grumble on, and useless light and heat are thrown off. Welcome to the currently unlovable standards situation in wireless communications for industrial use.

Of course, wireless for industry is just a radio. And controls these days are just computers. In the world where radios and computers play together, there are plenty of existing standards for all sorts of needs—ZigBee, Bluetooth, WiFi, to use their street names—but for various reasons, they have problems in factories. Some consume more power than is feasible for battery-operated equipment. Some invite highly problematic interference. Some require unwanted middleware or kludges to connect to automation. Some are just not reliable enough to handle industry (you would not, for example, want to use your cell phone to monitor a pressure vessel full of volatile compounds)
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The Standard Way To Do Things - The fact that wireless industrial standards are so new provides an excellent vantage point for observing the process of making a standard. Standards depend on consensus, and the means for reaching consensus can be intrinsically interesting.

Unfortunately, the detailed content of discussions around technicalities in industrial control networks is a different matter vis-à-vis intrinsic interest, at least to anyone outside the disciplines involved. Digital signal processing and the ramifications of control timing are not light dinnertime discussions. Engineering development in these arenas resembles development in every complex technical project: participants slog through a painstaking process of examining alternatives and weighing trade-offs.

Each person who has the knowledge, experience and skills needed for this kind of close technical examination, and who has made selections of one or two alternatives from among hundreds, usually comes away from the encounter with strong opinions. The upshot is, in any standards building process, there will be roomfulls of bright people, each initially leaning toward a specific and probably unique solution. Hammering out the differences can generate much heat while a standard is being born. We draw the curtain around this aspect of standards development, not for lack of importance, but for lack of space... Read more

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On-Demand Webcast- "Connecting and Managing Remote Devices with Wireless Technology"

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