Yokogawa Receives SICE Award

Yokogawa Electric Corporation (the Netherlands) has announced that it has received a Technology Award from the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers (SICE) for its achievements in the development of industrial wireless technology. The award was presented on September 22. Encouraged by this, Yokogawa will continue working to develop and popularize industrial wireless technology.

The Technology Award is in the highest rank of awards conferred by SICE. It is given in recognition of the development of a technology or methodology within the past five calendar years that represents a significant advance in any one of the science & technology fields or industries in which SICE is involved. Yokogawa received this award for the development of the following:

Award subject

Highly reliable industrial wireless communications infrastructure

Reason for winning

As interest in the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to grow, industrial wireless networks are being introduced for industrial automation applications where there is a need to improve the monitoring of production facilities. Yokogawa has greatly expanded the possibilities for wireless instrumentation by releasing the industry’s first fully duplex wireless system based on the ISA100 Wireless international standard (IEC 62734), which was developed for plant applications requiring highly reliable wireless technology. With its ability to update data every second, capability to collectively manage up to 500 devices, and dual redundant communication paths and system devices that prevent the loss of data, this wireless system achieves the high reliability required in process automation.

Yokogawa has won this Technical Award for a paper that was presented on this subject at the SICE Annual Conference 2015, which was held last July in Hangzhou, China.

The SICE was founded in 1961 to promote collaboration among scientists and engineers from various fields. In such areas as measurement, control, and information systems, SICE is working hard to address issues faced by the oil, petrochemicals, iron and steel, chemicals, telecommunications, and other industries. Since its establishment, SICE has supported advanced academic research in Japan.

The technologies and applications covered by the IEC 62734 standard, whose formal designation is ‘Wireless systems for industrial automation: Process control and related applications,’ were specified by IEC/TC65/SC65C/WG16 based on ISA100.11a, an international wireless communications standard for industrial automation.

ISA100 Wireless covers wireless network technologies with various functions that control and monitoring systems rely on for the transmission of data to and from field instruments such as sensors and actuators. Its specifications apply not only to monitoring but also to control.