Industrial system control: ISA-88, 95,106 standards

ISA, The International Society of Automation, is an international association under American law which brings together a network of 30,000 industrial systems control professionals covering instrumentation (sensors, actuators), automation (PLC, SCADA, DCS), IT, safety, and management of operational activities (MOM-MES).

The development of norms and standards is one of our most visible activities in the industry. The documentation produced concerns industrial control methods and technologies, and corresponds to prescriptive standards, recommendations or best practice guides, or technical reports, as the case may be.

The series of standards presented in this article correspond mainly to the second category: their study and application can facilitate the development of automation and operations management applications for industrial systems. They do not in themselves constitute mandatory requirements, beyond the constraints that manufacturers may impose on their partners by referring to them.

The history of these standards began in the early 1990s with ISA-88 "Batch control", for object-oriented automation of flexible batch processes.

It continued with ISA-95, which deals with the management of industrial systems operations (MOM – manufacturing operations management, and MES – manufacturing execution systems) and interoperability (interfaces between IT applications).

Both standards have been operationalized by B2MML, an XML schema specification for the representation of all the data structures specified therein, directly usable in computer interfaces.

Recently, ISA-106 proposed a technical report to address the automation of procedures in continuous processes in line with ISA-88 and ISA-95 standards.

In practice, manufacturers will find in these standards a set of best practices representing the rules of an art applied by a large community of experts, dealing with :

• object-oriented, flexible and robust specification and design of industrial automation ;

• functional organization of IT support for industrial operations (MOM-MES);

• structuring-contextualizing industrial databases to facilitate the processing of operational information for the execution, management, monitoring (including traceability), optimization or improvement of manufacturing processes;

• specification and design of interfaces between computer applications.

ISA-88 and ISA-95 are published as international standards IEC61512 and ISO/IEC62264 respectively.

The aim of this article is not...