Now we get to the part at many meetings that I hate. There is only one of me…honest, I’m just fat. When they divide the meeting into concurrent sessions, I have to pick which interesting topic I can’t sit in on. This is true of WBF this year, as well.
Topics of great interest that I will have to look at the proceedings for:
Applying S88 to Software Migration Engineering
S88 Isn’t Just for Batches Anymore
A Case Study for Batch Integration in a Specialty Chemical Facility
I sat in on the Plant2Enterprise Integration session, which was presented in cooperation with MESA International. It is getting very close to being the accepted wisdom that B2MML will succeed in becoming that missing link language…
Jerry Sandoval from Dow Chemical talked about transitioning from a proprietary MES to a commercial MES…part of the Dow automation learnings
we are getting to cover at CONTROL.
Charlie Gifford and Paresh Dalawalla gave a talk about the business case for ISA95…which still has not been entirely made.
Then it was time for the Security Panel: “What you don’t know CAN hurt you.”
“We’re here to get you to stop using the M&M approach to system security: hard on the outside, soft on the inside.” — Bryan Singer.
Once again, Bryan Singer, of Rockwell Automation, Chair of ISA SP99, and Lynn Craig, Dennis Brandl, and Keith Unger of Stone Technologies Inc., served on a panel discussing the real threats of penetration and attack in the process environment, and the fact that the plant floor space is so wildly different than the enterprise IT space that it often creates problems when the normal auditing procedures are used. Once again, the wisdom of chasing patches and trying to make the vendor keep his software updated for you was questioned, even denied. As Singer, showing a Gartner slide, pointed out, what is needed is to focus on determining how much security is necessary for each plant floor location and device, and use the same sort of engineering review that produces Safety Instrumentation Levels (SILs) to determine how much shielding each device or factory cell requires.
Great program. Y’all come next year.
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