ISA100 WCI Conducts Successful Interoperability Trial

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC -- The ISA100 Wireless Compliance Institute (WCI) announced the completion of another successful interoperability trial in which it verified its new Generic Client Interface (GCI) specification, which is applicable to ANSI/ISA-100.11a based gateways.

Conducted at ISA headquarters in NC, gateways from Yokogawa, Honeywell and Nivis successfully demonstrated interoperability with a WCI test client. The first production client to use GCI will be GE's System 1 product which was also successfully tested during the trial.

System 1 is GE's patented conditioning monitoring software platform for real-time optimization of equipment and selected processes, condition monitoring and event diagnostics that enables plant personnel to quickly identify important events, evaluate the situation and respond, leading to increased equipment availability, reliability and reduced maintenance costs.

ANSI/ISA-100.11a is flexibly designed to support legacy and/or proprietary protocols and the GCI is an example of how the ANSI/ISA-100.11a wireless standard can deliver that result.

"We are excited to see the success of this interoperability test conducted by the ISA100 Wireless Compliance Institute. WCI plays a crucial role in the success of ISA100 in the industrial space," said Hitoshi Yasui, general manager of Wireless Research and Development Business Unit, Yokogawa Electric Corporation. "Yokogawa has demonstrated leadership in defining, developing and deploying the ISA100 family of standards. We believe unique features of ISA100 allow Yokogawa to provide solutions to meet our industrial customers' requirements. Customer satisfaction has always been, and will always be, the primary goal of Yokogawa."

"With the successful outcome of the test, we continue to look forward to additional interoperability tests planned for the coming year with more ISA100-certified products in the queue to confirm the scalability, reliability and performance benefits of the ANSI/ISA-100.11a standard," said Andre Ristaino, managing director of WCI.

About the ISA100 Standard
The ANSI/ISA-100.11a industrial wireless networking standard is the first in the ISA100 open family of standards, focusing on the needs of process industries. The ISA100 Wireless Compliant certification ensures that supplier companies deliver interoperable wireless products and provides users the freedom to choose best-of-breed ANSI/ISA-100.11a devices from any supplier. As a result, automation engineers are able to create, modify, optimize and scale wireless networks quickly at user sites. With ISA100, customers have a solution that is open, interoperable, scalable and reliable for their most critical applications. ISA100 technology is simple to deploy, reliable, secure and supports traditional and future applications, including control. Built from the ground-up using open industry standards, ANSI/ISA-100.11a includes native IPv6 addressing, 6LoWPAN technology, AES-128 encryption, IEEE 802.15.4 radios, duocast transmission and object technology enabling control in the field.

ISA-100.11a-2011 received committee approval in 2011 and formal ANSI approval in January 2012. Headed toward internationalization, ANSI/ISA-100.11a-2011 was accepted as new work in IEC SC65C and as a Publicly Available Specification (PAS) IEC 62734 in 2011.

Planned additions to the ISA100 family of standards include support for backhaul functionality, factory automation, power management, asset and people tracking and other key use-cases. Details on the approved standard, the ISA100 roadmap and use-case presentations are available at the ISA Web site.

About the ISA100 Wireless Compliance Institute
The ISA100 Wireless Compliance Institute (ISA100 WCI) is a non-profit industry organization providing users and developers with market awareness, educational information, technical support and compliance for the ISA100 family of universal industrial wireless standards. ISA100 WCI provides real-world feedback from deployment of ISA100 devices and systems to ISA Standards Committees in order to foster rapid refinement and development of open industry standards for wireless applications. Institute members include end users, technology suppliers, research and development professionals, academia and other industry consortia and standards bodies.