Towards dependable CPS infrastructures: Architectural and operating-system challenges

Recently, vast investments have been made worldwide in developing Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) as solutions to key socio-economic challenges. The Internet-of-Things (IoT) has also enjoyed widespread adoption, mostly for its ability to add “sensing” and “actuation” capabilities to existing CPS infrastructures. However, attention must be paid to the impact of IoT protocols on the dependability of CPS infrastructures. We address the issues of CPS dependability by using an epidemic model of the underlying dynamics within the CPS’ IoT subsystem (CPS-IoT) and an interference-aware routing reconfiguration. These help to efficiently monitor CPS infrastructure—avoiding routing oscillation, while improving its safety. The contributions of this paper are threefold. Firstly, a CPS orchestration model is proposed that relies upon: (i) Inbound surveillance and outbound actuation to improve dependability and (ii) a novel information diffusion model that uses epidemic states and diffusion sets to produce diffusion patterns across the CPS-IoT. Secondly, the proposed CPS orchestration model is numerically analysed to show its dependability for both sensitive and non-sensitive applications. Finally, a novel interference-aware clustering protocol called “INMP”, which enables network reconfiguration through migration of nodes across clusters, is proposed. It is then bench-marked against prominent IoT protocols to assess its impact on the dependability of the CPS.

Naval forces rely heavily on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) to conduct operations and achieve mission success. As CPS infrastructure becomes exposed to the contested world through networks, CPS security becomes much more important. In a CPS, the cyber components manage the physical components. ONR proposes that the overall goal for CPS resiliency is to have the physical systems behave properly regardless of fault and disruption. Our approach to CPS resiliency focuses on the physical components. We observed that the inertia of the physical components provides a natural but limited resilience, and is capable of tolerating short-term disruption without affecting the health and safety of the CPS. This and the fact that a CPS has a large difference between physical and cyber time scales, enables a unique approach to CPS resiliency. We present Byzantine Fault Tolerant++ (BFT++), a cyber resilient architecture that engineers the cyber components to be brittle against attack, which consequently forces cyber attacks and related disruptions to be short-lived and within tolerance of the physical system’s inertia.

“MystifY”: A proactive Moving-Target Defense for a resilient SDN controller in Software Defined CPS

This paper presents definitions characterizing the concepts regarding cyber-physical systems and dependability. Cyber-physical systems incorporate computing, communication and storage capabilities with monitoring and/or control of entities in the physical world in a dependably, securely, efficiently and real-time way. The challenges of cyber-physical system research are concerning: real-time system abstractions; robustness, safety and security; QoS composition; and nor least dependability. Dependability is first introduced as a global concept that subsumes the usual attributes of reliability, availability, safety, integrity and maintainability. The paper aims to define research challenges to achieve the dependability in cyber-physical hydropower systems. The significant challenge of the dependability in cyber-physical hydropower systems is evaluation of the system behavior in terms of interdependencies between cyber and physical components of the system.

CPS is complex distributed systems, which contain computing, communications, and control. CPS is a product of the combination of physical world and the cyber world. The cyber world needs a lot of physical equipment to deal with perception and communication, then collect and transfer the information in the real environment, and by computation to forecast what might happen in future real environment, at last through the control strategy to achieve the optimal solution. In short, cyber physical system is the complex systems combination with computation system, sensory system and control system. Cyber physical system through more extensive connection, the physical world more thorough cognition, more effectively control the physical world, make the information world and the physical world closer integration, realize coordination awareness and control of the physical world. The paper through the analysis of the human perception system, build a cyber-physical fusion system based on human perception architecture.

Security and Privacy Aspect of Cyber Physical Systems

Cyber-physical systems are a kind of emerging large-scale distributed systems that are integrations of computation, networking, and physical worlds. Cyber physical systems are increasing scale and complexity with the growing pervasiveness of ICT and the development of the smart worlds such as smart factory, smart robotics, smart grids, smart cities, smart vehicles, smart healthcare systems, and smart homes. The growing interconnection of physical and virtual worlds of complex cyber physical systems, and the development of increasingly sophisticated intelligence techniques, has given rise to the next generation of CPS, that is referred to as smart cyber-physical systems (sCPS) which can efficiently operate, manage and control physical world and virtual world, and offer broad range of novel applications and services. Thus, smart cyber physical systems are complex cyber physical systems endowed with intelligent abilities. The main characteristic of such a new generation of smart cyber physical systems is the ability to interact with the physical worlds and adapt to new working environments through distributed intelligent mechanisms that executing and operating at the unit (single device), cluster (groups of devices) and network level (the network of devices). The properties like uncertainties, safety, reliability, and performance requirement, spatial-temporal requirement, and adaptation ability are very important, modeling smart cyber-physical systems must face these challenges and satisfy these specific requiremnts. In order to specify and model such kind of systems, we propose a new paradigm for specifying and modeling smart cyber physical systems based on software defined approach using Modelicaml. Software defined approach is a new way that help abstract the real world and virtual world with software components, this approach can simplify system specification, modeling and design. The main aim of ModelicaML is to enable an efficient and effective way to use Modelica, UML and SysML models reusing notations that are also used for software modeling based on software defined approach. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated with a case study of Vehicular Ad-hoc NETwork.

A Through Analysis on Protecting Cyber Threats and Attacks on Cps Embedded Subsystems

As computers and communication bandwidth become ever faster and cheaper, computing and communication capabilities are embedded in all types of objects and structures in the physical environment. Harnessing these capabilities to bridge the cyber-world with the physical world will allow the development of applications with great societal impact and economic benefit. At the heart of these applications are cyber-physical systems consisting of integrated computational and communication cores that interact with the physical world, with intelligence provided by embedded software. Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) are engineered systems that provide tight integration of and coordination between the cyber world of computing and communications and the physical world. CPS are to meet the needs of the new generation of engineered systems that are highly dependable, efficiently produced and certified, and capable of advanced performance in computation, communication, and control. CPS will transform how we interact with and control the physical world around us, as the Internet transformed how we interact and communicate with one another and revolutionized how and where we access information. One application domain of CPS is Medical Cyber-Physical Systems (MCPS), which are life-critical, context-aware, networked systems of medical devices. Medical device industry is undergoing a transformation, embracing the potential of embedded software and network connectivity. Instead of stand-alone devices that can be designed, certified, and used to treat patients independent of each other, distributed systems that simultaneously control multiple aspects of the patient's physiology are increasingly used in hospitals to provide high-quality continuous care for patients. The combination of embedded software controlling medical devices, networking capabilities, and complicated physiological dynamics of patient bodies makes MCPS complex. The need to design complex MCPS that are both safe and effective presents numerous challenges, including achieving high assurance in system software, interoperability, context-aware intelligence, autonomy, security and privacy, and device certification. In this talk, I will discuss these challenges in developing MCPS and present some of our work in addressing them, and several open research and development issues.

Digital Ecosystems represent the union between the digital world and real world. Cyber-Physical Systems provide a unified framework for connecting the abstract computational artifacts with the physical world. This allows for robust and flexible architectural design with multi-scale dynamics and integrated wired and wireless networking for managing the flows of mass, energy, and information in a coherent way. An example of Cyber Physical Systems is connecting sensors (which provide information from the physical world) to the internet (which represents the cyber world). Cyber-Physical Systems has recently been listed as the No.1 research priority by the U.S. President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Cyber-Physical Systems framework has the capability to tackle numerous scientific, social and economical issues. However, building Cyber-Physical Systems is not a trivial task. It requires a new ground-breaking theory that models cyber and physical resources in a unified framework. Digital Ecosystems constitute a superset which includes these Cyber Physical systems. Thus the underlying theories of Digital Ecosystems will help to provide important pointers to the development of these Cyber Physical Systems. None of the current state-of-the-art methods are able to overcome the challenges of building such Cyber Physical Systems due to the fact that computer science and theories underlying the real world have developed independently based on overly-simplified assumptions of each other. For example, many key requirements (e.g. uncertainty, inaccuracy, etc.) crucial to physical systems are not captured and fully dealt within the computer science research agenda. Similarly computational complexity, system evolution, software failure and failures of computer hardware are often ignored from the viewpoint of theories of the physical world, which treats computation as a precise, error-free, static ‘black-box’. The solution to Cyber-Physical Systems must break the boundary between the cyber world and the physical world by providing a unified infrastructure that permits integrated models addressing issues from both worlds simultaneously. Therefore, in this keynote, we explore an approach to such an infrastructure using the framework of Digital Ecosystems.

Broadly, cyber physical systems are systems that integrate computing into the physical world. Control systems, the increase in their intersection with information technology networks and the variety of communication methods also cause the threat vectors in cyber physical systems security to change and increase. This shows that traditional information technology security measures, new generation information technology security solutions or security solutions specific to control systems will be insufficient alone, and the need for integrated security solutions that include all components in the cyber physical systems network and include operational scenarios. In this work, it was cover a couple of definitions of cyber physical systems and it was present an overview of cyber physical systems, what they are, where they are found, and how they are used. It also includes some information on the specific reasons cyber physical systems present greater security demands. The stakes are higher, the components are much more difficult to maintain and update, and the systems are more complex. The goal is to understand these systems well enough to design effective security measures to counter potential attacks.

Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is an emerging intelligent systems, which is considered as a combination of computers and physical world. Events are usually as a natural way for interactions and communications, which occur in the physical world and can be responded in the cyber world. Additionally, using complex event processing (CEP) technology, some complex events can be processed that are better suited for complicated and intelligent CPS. At first, a component-model framework is proposed for modeling CPS architecture based on event-driven pattern operational semantics, which provides a tool to understand the transition based on event-driven pattern in CPS. In order to improve the immense workload on centralized CEP, a mixed master-slaves CEP is proposed. Meanwhile, an architecture of CPS with master-slaves CEP is constructed and its execution mechanism is introduced in detail.

By enabling the fusion of cyber and physical world, Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) have emerged as a key technology of the fourth industrial revolution – Industry 4.0. One of the major challenges for developing manufacturing CPSs is establishing communication between physical resources and Internet/cloud-hosted applications. Recently, MTConnect has become a widely popular communication method for monitoring machine tools in cyber manufacturing. However, it does not allow remote operations of machine tools over the Internet, which is essential in many manufacturing CPSs. This paper presents an Internet-scale service-oriented communication method named Machine Tool Communication (MTComm), which provides capabilities of both monitoring and operating heterogeneous machine tools over the Internet. MTComm allows machine tools to exchange manufacturing services and associated information in XML format through RESTful web services. This paper describes design and development of MTComm components, ontology, and methodology of data acquisition and direct operation through five types of services. To reduce communication latency and improve performance, three optimization strategies were developed and used in an edge-based middleware. Experiments were conducted in a testbed with five machines at different stages of MTComm development and results demonstrated excellent feasibility for efficiently monitoring and operating heterogeneous machine tools in a scalable cyber-physical manufacturing environment.

Context: Cyber-physical systems (CPS) seamlessly integrate computational and physical components. Adaptability, realized through feedback loops, is a key requirement to deal with uncertain operating conditions in CPS. Objective: We aim at assessing state-of-art approaches to handle self-adaptation in CPS at the architectural level. Method: We conducted a systematic literature review by searching four major scientific data bases, resulting in 1103 candidate studies and eventually retaining 42 primary studies included for data collection after applying inclusion and exclusion criteria. Results: The primary concerns of adaptation in CPS are performance, flexibility, and reliability. 64% of the studies apply adap- tation at the application layer and 24% at the middleware layer. MAPE (Monitor-Analyze-Plan-Execute) is the dominant adaptation mechanism (60%), followed by agents and self-organization (both 29%). Remarkably, 36% of the studies combine differ- ent mechanisms to realize adaptation; 17% combine MAPE with agents. The dominating application domain is energy (24%). Conclusions: Our findings show that adaptation in CPS is a cross-layer concern, where solutions combine different adaptation mechanisms within and across layers. This raises challenges for future research both in the field of CPS and self-adaptation, including: how to map concerns to layers and adaptation mechanisms, how to coordinate adaptation mechanisms within and across layers, and how to ensure system-wide consistency of adaptation.

One of the most significant directions in the development of computer science and information and communication technologies is represented by Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) which are systems of collaborating computational entities which are in intensive connection with the surrounding physical world and its on-going processes, providing and using, at the same time, data-accessing and data-processing services available on the internet. Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS), relying on the newest and foreseeable further developments of computer science, information and communication technologies on the one hand, and of manufacturing science and technology, on the other, may lead to the 4th Industrial Revolution, frequently noted as Industrie 4.0. The paper underlines that there are significant roots generally – and particularly in the CIRP community – which point towards CPPS. Expectations and the related new R&D challenges are also outlined.