Computational Intelligence - November 2016 - 4

Society
Briefs

Giovanni Acampora
Chair of IEEE CIS Standards Committee
University of Naples Federico II, Italy
Bruno Di Stefano
Vice-Chair of IEEE CIS Standards Committee
Nuptek ltd, CaNada
Autilia Vitiello
Vice-Chair of IEEE CIS Standards Committee
University of Salerno, Italy

IEEE 1855™: The First IEEE Standard Sponsored
by IEEE Computational Intelligence Society

o

ne of the main goals of IEEE is to
publish Standards, technical
papers that specify guidelines, best
practices and procedures aimed at optimizing the reliability of the materials,
products, design methods, and services
that people, scientists and engineers use
every day. Important IEEE Standards
with which people live each day are, definitely, IEEE 802.11 that defines a set of
specifications for implementing wireless
local area network (WLAN) computer
communication, and IEEE 754 that specifies a set of rules for enabling the floating-point computation. Currently,
around 4,000 Standards have been published by IEEE, each of which has been
sponsored by an appropriate IEEE society. As an example, IEEE 802.11 is an
IEEE Standard sponsored by IEEE Computer Society. However, in spite of the
large number of Standards published by
IEEE, IEEE Computational Intelligence
Society (CIS) had never sponsored the publication of a standard methodology or
technology. This was up to 27th May
2016, the day when IEEE Standards
Association (IEEE-SA) published IEEE
Std 1855™-20161, the IEEE Standard
for Fuzzy Markup Language, a markup
language aimed at providing a unified and
well-defined representation of Fuzzy Logic
Systems (FLS) [1]-[3]. This important goal
is the result of five years of activities, started
1

The official copy of the IEEE Std 1855™-2016 can be
downloaded by the following link: https://standards.
ieee.org/findstds/standard/1855-2016.html.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCI.2016.2602068
Date of publication: 12 October 2016

4

Initiating the
Project

Mobilizing the
Working Group

Drafting the
Standard

Maintaining the
Standard

Gaining Final
Approval

Balloting the
Standard

Figure 1 The Standards Development Lifecycle3: 1) Initiating the Project includes having an
idea, finding a sponsor (the organization that assumes responsibility for a particular standard
idea within IEEE) and submitting the PAR (a legal document that states the reason for the
project and what it intends to do); 2) Mobilizing the Working Group includes the definition of
a working group aimed at writing the standard and a hierarchy of officers to ensure that the
work proceeds smoothly; 3) Drafting the Standard includes finishing the first complete draft of
the Standard by following all editorial matters ranging from formatting to basic copyright
issues and achieving approval by working group through an internal voting; 4) Balloting the
Standard includes forming a balloting group containing persons interested in the standard and
belonging to several interest categories (e.g. producers, users) and starting ballot process during which balloters can vote and give comments; 5) Gaining Final Approval includes the submittal of the document approved during the ballot process to RevCom, which issues a
recommendation that is ratified or denied by the IEEE-SA Standards Board. After approval, the
standard is edited by an IEEE-SA editor and published; 6) Maintaining the Standard involves
the activities accomplished by the working group to make minor revisions or extensions to the
standard after its publication.

in early 2011 when Plamen Angelov, the
past chair of the IEEE CIS Standards Committee, joined IEEE CIS to the IEEE-SA
and asked the IEEE CIS AdCom members
to begin the standardization activity (see
Figure 1) for Fuzzy Markup Language by
means of an IEEE CIS Standards Committee motion. On 11th December 2011,
IEEE CIS AdCom in Cancun (Mexico)
approved the motion and enabled the new
chair of the IEEE CIS Standards Committee, Giovanni Acampora, to submit a Project Authorisation Request (PAR)2 to the

IEEE-SA. The PAR is a legal document
that states the reason for the project and
what it intends to do, together with the
list of persons charged to lead the standardization activity. The submission of the
PAR to the IEEE-SA was accomplished
on 13th December 2011, the official time
when the standardization activity for
Fuzzy Markup Language has started,
with project name IEEE P1855. Successively, this PAR document was reviewed
by the IEEE-SA New Standards Committee (IEEE-SA NesCom) and finally
approved on 6th February 2012. From

2

https://development.standards.ieee.org/get-file/
P1855.pdf?t=75152800003

IEEE ComputatIonal IntEllIgEnCE magazInE | novEmbEr 2016

3

http://standards.ieee.org/develop/index.html
https://standards http://www.ieee.org/findstds/standard/1855-2016.html
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Computational Intelligence - November 2016
