For several years now, ISA88 has been accepted worldwide as a way to define recipes and control batch processes, and ISA95 is gaining more acceptance as a way to connect batch control systems to higher- level software, such as data historians and ERP. But users and vendors are beginning to discover that both ISA88 and ISA95 can be used for more than just batch.
Take Steve Rubin, president of Longwatch in Norwood, Mass., for example. Longwatch makes video surveillance equipment that connects to HMI/SCADA systems via plant industrial networks, such as Modbus or Ethernet. Longwatch lets operators actually see the process equipment they are monitoring on HMI workstations (Figure 1).