Here's the press release, notwithstanding the fact that they have a whole track at this User Group on WirelessHART and how to use Yokogawa products with WirelessHART. #yoko #pauto

And further to the idea that there WILL be multiple wireless standards used in the industrial plant environment, here's a press release from the ZigBee folks that clearly plants them in the race for wireless sensor networks, not only in the process plant, not only in the discrete plant environment but in the Smart Grid environment, in power gen, in T&D, and in home automation.

As expected, the ISA100 standard committee yesterday voted in favor of the draft ISA100.11a. Now it must go to the Standards and Practices Board at ISA for approval, and then to ANSI before it is an officially recognized standard.

As Co-chair, ExxonMobil's Pat Schweitzer told me, "What we've done is passed a huge milestone. There's lots of work that still has to be done. There are comments that have to be integrated into the document, still. And we have to make one and make sure it works, too."

I received a news release from Tom Clary at Invensys this morning that got me thinking. It announced that IPS was hosting the ISA95 standard meetings next week:

Invensys Process Systems (IPS) is hosting an international meeting of enterprise integration standards experts at its headquarters in Plano, Texas, January 27-30, 2009.

Well, close to 100 of us spent most of last week in Mountain View, CA at the Ames NASA public affairs building doing the standards dance.

This time, however, I think we accomplished something very important.

It has been clear for some time that ISA100 needs to have something special, better, different than WirelessHART if it isn't going to become an "also-ran" standard.

Pat Schweitzer gave me permission to post this text-- it is the text of the talk he gave on Tuesday at the ISA100 opening plenary...and for the first time, ExxonMobil has allowed him to make a strong statement about how ExxonMobil feels about wireless. I'll let Pat speak for himself:

We're listening to four special interest sessions:

1. Mesh networks for cargo container security

2. NASA's needs for Wireless instrumentation and the "Fly-by-wireless" vision

3. provisioning devices overview

4. Federal Government Secure Wireless-- An SRNS perspective.

All of these presentations will be available on the ISA100 FTP site after the meeting. Gives you a new reason to get involved with ISA100, doesn't it?

We're going through a plenary session in which all the ISA100 Work Groups, Interest Groups, and Study Groups are sharing status reports. WG2 wants to go out of business. WG8 is back in business, and I have volunteered to be co-chair...

From the press release from the Automation Standards Compliance Institute, an ISA company:

NIST Collaborates with ISA100 Wireless Compliance Institute to Validate ISA100.11a Draft Standard