Spring 2018 Newsletter of ISO/TC 184/SC 4

I want to begin my first Chairman's remarks with a note of gratitude toward Howard Mason and his excellent leadership of SC 4 as we executed a seamless handoff at the turn of the year. In my first few months in this role, I have come to appreciate the focus this job requires and the trust you place in me to lead this exciting group of technical leaders. We have considerable activity leading up to our Beijing meeting 21 - 25 May and I want to take a few moments to share my thoughts leading up to the meeting.

Speaking of the Beijing meeting, you will recall that we are partnering with our parent committee and all subcommittees of the TC for a first ever "supermeeting" of the entire TC 184 community. I am excited at the opportunity to partner with our colleagues in SC 1, SC 5, WG 6 and JWG 21. While all of the SC's will be focused on their detailed work for the week, close proximity to the other SC's will enable sharing across boundaries that we have not had opportunity to experience before. My thanks go to our hosts at the Beijing Research Institute of Automation for Machinery Industry and the China Association for Mechatronics Technology and Application for finding a venue and coordinating this unique event. In addition to the joint venue for the event, we will have a "Cavalcade Day" that will take the place of our normal Industry Day and will give each of us an opportunity to learn, collaborate and contribute to a roadmap for the Committee that will reinforce our commitment to Smart Manufacturing.

In order to accommodate these events, we have agreed with the other SC's and TC 184 to a few changes for this meeting that you need to be aware of. Please check the schedule for the event to ensure your plan incorporates the necessary changes for attending the meeting. In case your travel arrangements allow, our hosts have planned a tour of the Chinese Summer Palace on Sunday afternoon. I hope you can find time to enjoy that before we begin the week's hard work on Monday morning with a joint session of TC 184 and all SCs. Also, we will not be holding our traditional Industry Day on Wednesday. Instead, we will participate in a joint meeting of TC 184, SC 1, and SC 5 for "Cavalcade Day". The remainder of the week will operate as normal with an Open Technical Forum on Monday regarding a SC 4 strategy regarding unique identifiers, the Change Board on Thursday and the Business Meeting on Friday morning. The parent committee TC 184 will start their meeting on Friday afternoon and conclude on Saturday.

"Cavalcade Day" is an important collaborative event for the TC with a couple of important points about the day for SC 4. The first point is relative to the structure of the day. The day is split into two parts. A morning session will be focused on level setting and general information across all the SCs and parent TC 184 coupled with presentations from key industry speakers sharing their perspective on smart manufacturing. The afternoon will be focused on a World Café event that will be an interactive workshop focused on collecting input toward the day's theme "Smart Manufacturing: Enabling the future through Standards". This afternoon event requires the active participation of the entire SC and I am looking forward to everyone's involvement in the day. Results from the day will feed into a roadmap exercise at the parent TC 184 level and set a strategic direction for our SC in context of smart manufacturing. Please bring your curiosity and thoughts about how our team enables smart manufacturing and the challenges we face toward that goal.

Our existing WG's have important work to complete at this meeting as well. PPC will be focused on terminology and scope definition actions from the last meeting and absorbing a major update to the ISO Directives that are due to be released the first week of May. WG 3 continues their work on multiple parts to ISO 15926. JWG 8 will not be meeting for this meeting. WG 12 is very focused on near term delivery dates for AP 242, AP239, AP235 and AP243/MoSSEC. There is continuing progress of STEP Extended Architecture and a novel approach to using AGILE methods as a means to accelerating development and release of STEP standards. WG 13 will be continuing work on ISO 8000 including bringing forward an NP for Part 51. WG 15 is working hard on a demo of Smart Manufacturing for "Cavalcade Day" and work on multiple standards including a harvesting proposal from ANSI on QIF. Finally, the validation teams of WG 21, 22, and 23 will be hard at work.

In addition to the work of existing team across the WG's I would like to extend a warm welcome to new working groups that have been formalized since our last meeting in Jeju. First, WG16 "Formats for visualization and other derived forms of product data" has launched and is led by Prof. Soonhung Han as Convenor and Christophe Mouton as Deputy Convenor. They will be meeting for the first time at our Beijing meeting and there is already a rich set of experts coming forward from NSBs. In addition, we have Joint Working Group authorizations in place with ISO/IEC JTC1 WG 24 and ISO/TC 171/SC 2 to form a three way working group focused on this important topic and there are several work items coming forward for the WG's consideration. Further, we have formalized a JWG with IEC "Product Properties and classes and their identification". This group comes from the important work completed through the TMB/SMB Joint Task Force on Database for Product Properties and Classes (DPPC) and will be chaired by Mr. Hiroshi Murayama and will pioneer ISO's use of the IEC CCD in a collaborative relationship between ISO and IEC, led by ISO.

Finally, I have been active in the in the Smart Manufacturing Coordination Committee (SMCC) and IEC/ISO JWG 21 "Smart manufacturing reference models". The SMCC is drafting a status report to the TMB regarding the first two year's performance and asking for an extension to the mandate. Recent accomplishments include the formation of a Task Force to formulate a standards map for smart manufacturing and final stage consensus on the definition of smart manufacturing with the IEC SMB. Further, IEC continues to make progress in formalizing a System Committee that will operate in a peer relationship to the ISO SMCC. JWG 21 has launched multiple Task Forces that are focused on reference models that will relate to the standards map in time. As I know that many do not participate directly in these forums and are impacted by the activity, I have posted key artifacts from both SMCC and JWG 21 in the SC 4 Drop Box in eCommittees. If you are interested, please refer to that material and contact me if you have questions.

Kenny Swope
Chair, ISO/TC 184/SC 4