Standardization in Lab Automation

The consortium for Standardization in Lab Automation (SiLA) is a not-for-profit membership organization formed by software suppliers, system integrators and pharma/biotech companies.

Highly skilled experts of member companies contribute in SiLA's technical work groups.

Membership is open for institutions, corporations and individuals active in the life science lab automation industry.

SiLA is the global initiative to standardize software interfaces in the field of life science research instrumentation, like autosamplers, and laboratory automation.

Instigated by the pharmaceutical industry's need for flexible laboratory automation, the initiative is supported by major device and software suppliers worldwide.

Industry provides commercial laboratory devices to perform increasingly sophisticated tasks.

This situation leads to a waste of resources: Available equipment needs to be replaced for compatibility reasons, software drivers have to be purchased or developed, and data conversion is time-consuming.

Such technical obstacles impede the development of higher level autonomous experimentation systems.

SiLA enables researchers to focus on their scientific questions by reducing equipment connectivity effort to a minimum.

Advancements seen on the home consumer electronics marked like USB or UPnP triggered the idea of applying a similar approach to the laboratory automation environment.

The idea of a standardized interface based on the Common Command Set (CCS) concept was born.

SiLA 2 addresses control and data interfaces between devices and process management, LIMS and Enterprise Systems.

Focus on behaviour and service oriented design structures leads to the Feature Definition Language (FDL).

Error recovery procedures are also supported and the general behavior of the devices is managed by a state machine.

Membership is open for institutions, corporations and individuals active in the life science lab automation industry.