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Intergraph Corporation announced that the American Red Cross presented the Company with the Circle of Humanitarian Award, the organization's highest award honoring financial assistance, for its support of disaster relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The award was presented by Rick Cantrell, executive director of the Madison/Marshall County Chapter of the American Red Cross, and received by R. Halsey Wise, president and CEO, Intergraph.

Indacomp specializes in custom automation applications for a variety of industries. The transaction will bring Indacomp into the Litzler Group as Litzler Automation. Litzler Automation will serve existing Litzler customers with high quality drives and control systems and existing Indacomp customers with expanded automation solutions.

At Inductive Automation, our integrator program is the core of our business. We believe that our integrators are doing us a service by promoting our software to their customers. We understand that it is only through your hard work and skillful implementation that the quality of our software shines through. Being born from a system integration company, these philosophies have guided Inductive Automation since its inception, and are most apparent in our integrator program.

Mitsubishi Electric is continuing on its growth course, with the Industrial Automation division posting double-digit growth figures throughout Europe in all product categories. At the 2006 Hannover Messe trade show the company is going to continue the product offensive started in 2005, presenting a wide range of new products in strategically important sectors.

Under the umbrella of Factory Automation, the leading trade fair for production automation, "Automation Live" is becoming one of HANNOVER MESSE's strongest draws. Together with Volkswagen AG and other renowned technology partners, Deutsche Messe AG will present visitors with a live demonstration of innovative applications in automobile manufacturing in Hall 17.

LXI certification indicates approval by the LXI Board to officially license the LXI logo for display on compliant products. Agilent is now shipping a variety of modular and compact instruments within five product families: modular power system; DC power supplies; digital multimeters; and multifunction switch/measure unit. Elgar achieved certification for two programmable DC power supply families.

The 16th Annual Joint ISA POWID/EPRI Controls and Instrumentation Conference and the 49th Annual ISA POWID Symposium will be held 4-9 June 2006 at the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose, California. The theme of the symposium is Effective Integration of Safety, Security, Reliability with Control Systems: Measurement and Control Challenges and Solutions for the Power Industry in the Changing Economic and Regulatory Environment.

Automation professionals around the world are invited to submit an abstract for the ISA EXPO 2006 Technical Conference Program to be held on 17-19 October 2006 in Houston, Texas. Abstracts are selected based on topic area and presentation category. Topic areas for the event include safety and security, environmental and quality control, industrial networking, process automation, and systems integration.

PackAL will be added to the OPW Guidelines for Packaging Machinery Automation. An updated version of these guidelines is scheduled to be released in April. PackAL is an application library of common software elements used in packaging applications that was developed by the PackSoft subgroup of the OPW. The application library is made up of twenty-three functions. Thirteen functions are machine functions, such as wind/unwind, dancer control, registration, and indexing.

Attendees will receive an introduction to the WAGO-I/O-SYSTEM hardware, overview of Industrial Ethernet components and protocols, hands on IEC 61131-3 programming session with live demo PLCs, and review/create web services or applications (such as alarm emails, web pages, etc. from the controller.

The symposium covers all aspects of process composition analysis including analyzer technologies such as chromatography, spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, chemical analysis, physical analysis methods, sample systems, and gas and liquid sensors and detectors. The symposium also covers the practical use of these technologies and explores maintenance, systems integration, safety and networking and communications.

The committee will be formed to create a standard that adopts the generic language specified by IEC 61804 to describe the properties of automation system components. The specified language is capable of describing device parameters and their dependencies, device functions, graphical representations, and interactions with control devices.

The newly elected ODVA officers are: President: Doug McEldowney; Executive Director: Katherine Voss; Treasurer: Steve Freedman; Chief Technology Officer: Rich Harwell; and Secretary: Katherine Voss. Elected representatives for the Regular Membership include Dave Dodds and Steve Freedman on the ODVA Board of Directors and Jörgen Palmhager on the ODVA Technical Review Board.

The affiliation will allow both organizations to build on their respective strengths. The two organizations are working through the final stages of the arrangements that would result in WBF functioning as independent affiliate of ISA. Remaining steps should be completed in the first half of 2006.

The Automation Alliance will provide industry wide strategic analysis and coordination through its member organizations. The Alliance will provide technical management, administration, and integrated services such as seminars, web conferences, training, and conference services to be shared among participating organizations.

A variety of products from Agilent Technologies, Keithley Instruments, Inc., Rohde & Schwarz and Symmetricom were tested in key areas of the specification, including LAN functionality, Web interface, programming API and hardware triggering. The event, which took place Feb. 14-16 in Irvine, Calif., was attended by 46 members of the LXI Consortium.

One year after affiliating with ISA, OMAC's outlook is brighter than ever. OMAC is reporting renewed strength in the development and use of open, interoperable control and automation systems technologies for end users, technology providers, and OEMs. OMAC reported on progress made in a number of packaging, manufacturing infrastructure and machine tool initiatives at its annual meeting. The meeting was held in concert with the ARC Next Generation Manufacturing Forum in Orlando, FL.

xCouplers modules install into factory floor PLCs to provide a simple way to exchange factory floor and enterprise server data. They provide a seamless and secure method to provide real time information flow between the plant floor control systems and business systems than conventional HMI- or PC-based custom software methods.

The ISA Foundation is gearing up to give scholarships, encourage student development, and support standards development in 2006. Through the Foundation, ISA awards educational scholarships each year. Scholarships for tuition and research activities are given to graduate and undergraduate students. Students must demonstrate outstanding potential for long-range contribution to the automation profession. Since 2001, ISA has awarded over $135,000 in scholarships to 53 well-deserving students.