The effort is also intended to be compatible with the ISA-95 series of manufacturing integration standards.
This combined approach is expected to enable end-users to better apply both the ISA-88 and ISA-95 series principles to various manufacturing industries, as well as extend savings and benefits already realized by the batch industries into both discrete and continuous manufacturing environments.
Although originally developed to address batch control issues, the ISA-88 series of standards has often been applied to continuous and discrete manufacturing, packaging lines and other manufacturing applications. This effort will clarify and make these non-batch applications easier to implement for end-users, the ISA said.
One of the key benefits offered in this initiative is modularity, allowing lower engineering and training costs and flexibility for more production capability. Other benefits include the use of standards-based procedure models to meet changing operations requirements, improvements in the consistency and quality of products, and improved control over the manufacturing process.
Because the structure of the batch standard mirrors the structure required for flexible manufacturing, the ISA-88 principles can be extended to many continuous as well as discrete applications. The standard is flexible, and depending on the functionality required, can be adapted to many different types of applications. A group known as Make2Pack—a joint working group of the WBF, the ISA SP88 committee and the Open Modular Architecture Controls Users Group, (OMAC, www.omac.org)—is working to find ways to apply these standards-based principles to machine-based control.
