Over five years have passed by since the first meeting of the Working Group (WG) 41 dealing with Instrumental Odour Monitoring Systems (IOMS). WG41 is under the umbrella of the Technical Committee 264 on Air Quality of the CEN. In these over 5 years, the group have met 20 times to try to get a draft of a text to be approved in the time frame available for CEN Standards, but WG41 could not deliver that draft. This means that there will not be a European standard on IOMS in the near future.
CEN has decided to start over the process with WG41. After an initial extension given in 2019, the text could not be finalized, so now it is time to wrap up and start over again. This means that there will be no standard on IOMS in the near future. The new work item will be proposed by the end of the year in order to be approved during the next TC meeting (May 2022). Later it will be circulated and voted from all countries, which takes 6 to 8 months, so, according to some experts asked, the work will not start before February/March 2023.
Another stone in the process of having a CEN standard on IOMS was just received last week in the form of an e-mail sent to WG members indicating that the Dutch Secretariat is stepping out of WG 41. CEN is asking to other national committees to carry out this task, which looks like that there will be no problem as there are news from Italy and Germany on moving forward to get the lead on this initiative.
For those of you who are eager to have an standard on this issue, remember that there are some national Standards on IOMSs such as the Dutch NTA 9055:2012, the German VDI/VDE 3518 Part 3 or the Italian UNI 11761:2019. In addition, there are other developments related to IOMSs such as the 3 initiatives carried out by IEEE that are well alive at this stage.
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