This technical report provides an overview of the benefits, best practices, and language, including terms and definitions, for applying procedure automation across the continuous process industries. In agreement with the scope of the ISA106 Committee, this technical report focuses on automated procedures that primarily reside on systems within the supervisory control, monitoring, and automated process control section (as defined by ISA-95 functional levels 1 and 2 – see clause 2, References) of a production process (as defined by ISA-95 functional level 0). It was not the intent of the committee to have this technical report focus on procedure execution at the operations management functional level (as defined by ISA-95 level 3). The interaction with manual procedures is within the scope, but manual procedures are outside the scope of this technical report.

Additionally, the focus of this technical report is on continuous processes. However, the contents of the technical report may be used in other types of process control such as batch or discrete.

The technical report is intended to be applicable to process control activities within the basic process control system (BPCS) and its interactions with safety instrumented systems (SIS). Required safety instrumented functions (SIFs) should be analyzed and implemented in accordance with ISA-84 (see clause 2). Since automated procedures often interact with SIS, the creation of automated procedures should be performed in close cooperation with SIS implementation teams.