Message from the Chair:

Despite all the restrictions on travel, experts from across the world were able to move our ISO/TC 184/SC 4 work program forward on a number of key projects critical to industrial needs.  We welcome Canada as a P Member to the group and look forward to future collaboration with them and all of our experts across 18 P Members, 14 O Members and numerous liaison organizations.    We advanced important work on ISO 8000, ISO 10303, and ISO 23247.  We have updated our internal procedures to expand and account for the STEP Extended Architecture and released a much needed update to our Supplementary Directives through the Quality Committee.  We made significant progress in our support to Smart Manufacturing and are progressing the use of JIRA and GIT in the development of our standards. In all, a very satisfying week of activity that would not be possible without the dedication, attention to details, and above all, patience with our situation and the passion to keep moving forward.  Our next Plenary will be virtual as well and is scheduled for 10 -14 May, 2021 where we will take up lessons from this Plenary and continue our amazing work on standards for Industrial Data.  I wish everyone a safe holiday season and look forward to seeing you online! Now let's hear what the convenors accomplished in each of the WG sessions.

The Convenors' Take

Outcomes & Impacts from the 80th Plenary

ISO/TC 184/SC 4's 80th Plenary took place from the 2nd to 6th of November. It was four days of work across working groups and joint-working groups. In the convenors' own words here are the outcomes and accomplishments of all the hard work.

Work Group 12/21

At the Plenary we celebrated new editions of  10303-1, 59, 113, and 210 being published. The following were additional efforts of work by WG 12/21:

• A summary of work to date on a five year roadmap for 10303 STEP was presented.
• WG12/T1 Shape committee presented an update on  the ISO Geometry / Topology Ontology Feasibility Technical Report work.
• The  status of the STEP Extended Architecture SC4 Standing Documents and related Implementation Standards were presented.
• The SMRL Innovation Task Force reported on work to date on a new process for publishing STEP Standards.

Working Group 11

At the plenary we continued work to finalize publication of several 10303 standards guiding the interface between SysML and XSD (Part 15), EXPRESS (Part 16) and web services (Part 18). A fourth standard (Part 17) is under development covering the transition from EXPRESS to SysML.

Working Group 13/23

At this plenary progress continued on an active work program to develop 10 more parts of ISO 8000 for data quality. The following were additional efforts of work by WG 13/23:

• Recently, a fourth edition of ISO 8000-2 (Vocabulary for data quality) became the latest addition to the 17 published parts of ISO 8000
• Investigations have begun to explore the relationship of ISO 8000 with the ISO/IEC 25000 family of standards for software product quality

Joint-Working Group 16

At this plenary WG 13/23 finalized the following:

Publication of ISO TR 24464 Visualization elements of digital twins

• DTw (digital twin) Workshop at Web3D 2020 conference. Free registration at https://web3d.siggraph.org/industrial-use-cases/
• NP ballot started: ISO NP 3151 Visualization components of PLM-MES interface for plant industry
• Resolution I : Approve ISO/AWI 17506 (COLLADA) to move to DIS ballot

Working Group 15

The takeaway for WG15 of this plenary is that ISO 23247 passed it DIS ballot, so it is on track to become an International Standard in 2021!

ISO 23247 is the "Digital Twin framework for manufacturing" and it describes how enterprises should monitor the results of their manufacturing operations by "twinning" the physical objects and processes on their shop floor with digital models in their computer systems.

Interest in this new standard has been intense because digital models can be measured more often, at much less cost, and with much lower latency than physical models. Therefore, successful digital twinning will make your manufacturing operations more accurate, more flexible and more efficient. A demo of the technology was given shortly before the plenary, and was watched live by more than 500 worldwide experts in manufacturing.