WBF Conference Features Expanded Agenda

WBF, formerly the World Batch Forum, has announced that the agenda for this year’s North American Conference has been expanded to include more value for automation and manufacturing professionals. The 2006 North American Conference will be held March 5-8 at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel in Atlanta.

New to the agenda this year are updated tutorials on the Instrumentation, Systems and Automation Society’s ISA-88 and ISA-95 standards, as well as a new tutorial on SP99, presented by Brian Singer, chairman of the SP99 committee that is developing the ISA-99 standard. ISA-88 is a batch processing standard, ISA-95 is standard covering plant floor-to-enterprise communication and ISA-99 is a security standard.

Other new tutorials at the WBF event will cover application of the B2MML (Business-to-Manufacturing Markup Language) schemas, which were developed as an ISA-95 implementation; as well as and “How to Deal with Legal Issues Facing the Automation Industry.”

The program has also been expanded to include Monday and Tuesday plenary sessions, each with keynote speakers; and dual-track sessions on Monday afternoon that offer more choices in papers. MESA International, an affiliated organization, will present a session on system security, while the Control and Information Systems Integrators (CSIA) will also participate in the program. A special panel session on Tuesday morning will discuss “Future Trends in Automation.”

User focus

“We are very excited about the quantity and excellent quality of the papers and presentations that we have included on this year’s agenda,” says Bill Stewart Jr., regional engineering leader, West Virginia/Pacific for Dow Chemical, and program chairman for the WBF 2006 North American Conference. Stewart is responsible for all program activities for this year’s conference, and for making sure there is a strong user focus.

The 2006 North American Conference is open to both WBF members and non-members. The complete program can be found at the WBF Web site, www.wbf.org, where attendees can also register online for the event.