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Summary

ISA Energy and Water Automation Conference

The ISA Energy and Water Automation Conference, scheduled for 7-8 August 2019 at the Omni Championsgate Resort in Orlando, Fla., will have interactive sessions led by ISA's power generation, alternative energy, municipal water, and industrial water experts. The conference program will cover technologies and best practices that apply to multiple infrastructure sectors.

Challenges the industry faces today include using data analytics in a meaningful way, navigating the new world of Industrial Internet of Things with safety and cybersecurity in mind, and applying the insights of recent "Smart Cities" initiatives to improve operations.

"Part of ISA's mission is to increase technical competency by connecting automation professionals, and this event is a perfect example of how that can benefit our industries," said ISA Executive Director Mary Ramsey. "Technology applications that are working in one sector can often translate to another, but users and solution providers have to engage in meaningful dialogue to find those synergies. ISA can be a venue for those discussions in multiple ways, from standards development to content creation to in-person events."

ISA's Water/Wastewater Industries Division will bring expertise and content focused on effective utility management, water/wastewater operations and maintenance, IT/OT coordination, engineering best practices, integration/programming, supervisory control and data acquisition, programmable logic controllers, instrumentation, cybersecurity, and asset management related to the treatment and distribution of water and the collection and treatment of wastewater.

ISA's Power Industries Division plans to host sessions covering automation and control solutions for oil and gas exploration, processing, and refining with a focus on power generation methodologies, including harnessing wind and solar energy.

Many industries rely on sourcing, transporting, handling, recycling, and disposing industrial water as a core element of their power generation strategies. Infrastructure that supports both power and water are also at the heart of the "Smart Cities" initiatives.

For more information about the event, visit https://isaautomation.isa.org/ewac2019.

New book on situation management available

The new book, Situation Management for Process Control (www.isa.org/situationmgmt), is intended to unify industry understanding of how to deliver real value to control room operations. Written by Douglas H. Rothenberg, PhD—an expert in alarm management and operator support technology—the book explores control room management as a discipline, focusing on the applicable tools, technology, and methodologies that foster safer, more effective control room functioning and improved industrial production.

Situation management is the sum total of the real-time decisions and actions that the operator makes to determine whether or not the enterprise operates safely and productively. These include accurately and appropriately assessing the current operating environment, transforming that assessment into needed action for proper management of abnormal situations, and validating the effectiveness of the action.

"Properly understood and executed, it is a game changer in safe and effective operation of industrial plants and operations," states Rothenberg. "It advances a firm technical framework that ties together all of the traditional individual aspects (e.g., procedures, the human-machine interface, control room design, and more) into a technology to understand and design effective control room management operations. This is a unified approach with explicit tools to deliver situation management to control room operators. The tools to see problems are followed by the tools to manage them."

New contributions, Rothenberg points out, are the concepts and technology of weak signals and their use to supplement the alarm system and cover situations that alarms are not intended or able to manage.

"Weak signals are small indicators of things that don't appear quite right," he explains. "They can be discovered everywhere; understanding and exploiting them will lead to valuable clues and the ability to confirm something likely going amiss."

Rothenberg emphasizes the importance and relevance of the book to managers, supervisors, operators, human-factors engineers, safety personnel, and technicians in industrial enterprises and operation centers. It will also be useful for regulators, specialists, engineers, system designers, and trainers at commercial firms who create monitoring and controls hardware, software, and technology for end users.

New CAPs and CCSTs

Qualifying for and passing one of ISA’s certification exams is a noteworthy accomplishment. The exams are rigorous and require a solid command of various disciplines in automation and control. Below is a list of individuals who have recently passed either our Certified Automation Professional (CAP) or one of the three levels of our Certified Control System Technician (CCST) exam. Congratulations to our new certification holders! For more information about the ISA CAP and CCST certification programs, please visit https://www.isa.org/certification.

Certified Control System Technicians

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