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The folks in the wireless group at Honeywell Process Solutions must be pretty pleased at this point with two important pieces of news. The company is seeing some of its labors coming to fruition with advancements in the ISA 100 wireless standard.The first part is that last week ISA announced that the ISA 100.11a document has been ratified, which puts the field instrumentation part of the larger standard into effect. Let’s be clear that this is not for or about just Honeywell, but one could argue that from the vendor side, no other company has worked harder to see this happen. Moreover, the standard was not pushed onto the organization. The ultimate result is different than Honeywell would have liked in some critical aspects, but the company has chosen to accept these changes and work within the system.WWW_PLCJS※COM－PLC－技×术_网(可编程控※制器技术门户)
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The second part is that the ISA100 Wireless Compliance Institute announced that Dan Sheflin from Honeywell was selected as the institute’s first chairman. Dr. Penny Chen from Yokogawa was selected as the first vice chairman. Sheflin is vice president of advanced technology for Honeywell’s Automation and Control Solutions (ACS) division, headquartered in Minneapolis, MN. Within the great Honeywell org chart, ACS is the parent division for HPS. While Sheflin’s ability to influence the direction of the institute will no doubt be limited, he must be highly motivated to see that it does its job effectively.——可——编——程——控－制－器－技——术——门——户
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All this is critical to HPS because its OneWireless program uses the ISA 100.11a standard for its field instrumentation. Given that the standard was not officially approved until last week, this became something that had to be worked around and put a drag on other companies adopting the platform as well. For more than a year, HPS has been advertising that its OneWireless instruments are compliant with the “coming” 11a standard, but now that it’s finished, that qualifier can be removed. Jeff Becker, director of HPS’s global wireless business says that the technical aspects of the standard have been largely finalized for quite a while, but that there will still likely be a small software change that can be broadcast to installed devices to complete the process.WWW_P※LCJS_CO※M－PLC－技－.术_网
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Going forward, it will be interesting to watch the competition between ISA 100.11a and WirelessHART. The latter got off to an earlier start, but it’s hard to see how much progress the early adopters have made. There aren’t all that many WirelessHART devices available yet, but more are in the works. There are also ISA 100.11a devices available and more in the works as well. I suspect the numbers are similar.WW.W_PLCJS_COM－PLC－技.术_网
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HPS has been pushing the ISA platform as a more versatile and sophisticated platform on which to build. One characterization is that comparing 11a to WirelessHART is like comparing the communication capabilities of devices on a fieldbus against hard wired 4-20 mA with HART. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it isn’t that far off either. The question that a user has to ask is how much sophistication you expect from your instrumentation. Make sure the platform you want to use can provide it.WWW_PLCJS※COM－PLC－技.术_网(可※编程控※制器技术门户)