TRSA’s Technology Committee and UTSA’s Information Technology Committee have teamed up to explore the possibility of creating a common language that various plant machinery systems can use to communicate with each other. 
 
The XML Plant Task Force, named after the most common method of data interchange between disparate systems, recently met to kick off the effort. Both associations have had long-standing discussions on the need for such a protocol. 
 
Currently, individual systems in a plant—a washer and a production management system, for example—talk to one another through a protocol developed by one of the ...