Despite the enthusiasm, the ISA community in 2022 also highlighted significant hurdles:

The framework leverages ISA-88 equipment phases. A calculation is no longer a standalone math block; it is integrated into a phase logic. For instance, a "Heating Phase" contains not just the state machine for heating, but also the generated calculations for heat rate prediction and energy balance, all derived from the same model.

At its heart, the "CalcGen" concept discussed in ISA 2022 circles is about normalization. In traditional workflows, an engineer writes a specification, a programmer writes code, and a third engineer writes a test plan. These are three separate artifacts.

The CalcGen framework proposes a single source of truth. Instead of writing a document describing a Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) loop, the engineer creates a structured data model defining the loop’s parameters (tuning constants, setpoint limits, alarms).

The 2022 focus highlighted three pillars of this framework: