The increasing IT/OT-Security threat for industrial plants is leading to new regulations such as the EU Cyber Resiliance Act. At the same time, innovations such as flexible production systems are being driven forward, resulting in changes to the automation architecture and therefore also to possible attack vectors. Existing security concepts must be reviewed for these developments, whereby the use of certificates and therefore the use of a public key infrastructure is fundamental for many security mechanisms. This paper analyzes especially new system architectures like modular production cells or interconnected machine parts with respect to security. For this purpose, different architectural principles such as Gray- and Black-Box are used as a basis and placed in the context of current specifications of certificate management.

With the progressive development of digital twins, simulation models are becoming increasingly important. They are already a central artefact in the entire systems engineering and are becoming an substantial part of the delivery, either a virtual or a real product, itself. In contrast to physical components, whose quality requirements are defined very precisely in terms of detailed specifications, this is rarely the case with simulation models. On the one hand, this is due to the novelty of simulation models as an independent good and, on the other hand, to the fact that there are no comprehensively defined quality criteria for simulation models. The authors address this problem and present a role-based metric for objectively determining the quality of simulation models. In addition to the quality-relevant attributes, a role concept is presented that enables the seamless application of the metric. The objective is for the quality level to be specified on a transparent and measurable basis and can thus become part of the business in automation technology.

To address the need for flexibility of production plants in the process industry modularization is a widely accepted approach. In particular, the Module Type Package Concept described in VDI/VDE/NAMUR 2658 is seen as a possible core part for modularization. A clear separation of engineering efforts into plant-independent module engineering and plant-specific integration engineering as well as a fast integration of a module’s automation system into a higher-level process control system changes the fundamental automation architecture. However, in the state-of-the-art technical literature which has been analyzed and applied by the authors, few security considerations are made for modularization and especially the Module Type Package. This is even more problematic considering that even with an extensive field of security analysis, standards, and guidelines to secure conventional operational technology recent reports found severe vulnerabilities in those. This paper elaborates on security standards and guidelines to which the Module Type Package Concept should be compliant to achieve a high coverage regarding security requirements in the context of industrial automation and control systems. Based on this a security analysis of the Module Type Package Concept is performed on the IEC 62443, VDI/VDE 2182, and NIST SP 800-82.

Modularization involves separating system functionality into individual modular units, which must subsequently be associated again using suitable methods. This results in the desired flexibility and adaptability of future production systems. In this context, two association mechanisms are distinguished - orchestration and choreography. While orchestration approaches are well established in many automation applications, choreography is a rather new method for associating automation functions. When evaluating choreographies in the process industry, it has become apparent that not all subsystems participating in a choreography may be choreography-enabled. Thus, this contribution presents an extension of the already published choreography pattern for industrial automation including orchestration capabilities into a choreography. In this way, also non-choreography-enabled subsystems can participate in a choreography. This opens up a further degree of freedom and thus increases the flexibility and adaptability of production systems.

This paper examines the coordination of physically linked packaging lines based on so-called Automation Service Choreographies. For this purpose, an exemplary packaging line is considered, which is automated in a service-based manner according to the Module Type Package (MTP) concept. To coordinate the modules of this line, they exchange relevant system variables by means of direct module-to-module communication. Each module additionally contains module-internal rules that describe how its behavior depends on the incoming information. It is shown that in this way a distributed coordination of the packaging line can be achieved. In addition, a second interface is presented, by which the packaging line as a whole can be integrated into a higher-level system.

The Digital Twin is one of the future key technologies of digitization and Industry 4.0. Through coupling the vast amount of available static and dynamic data about a physical asset with intelligent software functions, it aims for simplifying the increasingly complex functions and interconnections of automation systems. This makes it necessary to provide the Digital Twin with updated and high-quality data about the physical asset. However, little attention is paid to data not generated by the asset itself but from external data sources. This is partly due to a lack of methodologies for identifying and evaluating external data relevant for a specific Digital Twin. The contribution of this work is a categorization of data for the Digital Twin and a methodology to support the identification of data from outside of the physical asset. The work-in-progress refers to the context of industrial automation and is to be validated in the future in laboratories containing discrete manufacturing facilities at Pforzheim University and the University of Stuttgart.

Process engineers design industrial process plants using piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs). Today, data analysts who diagnose plant disturbances based on historical signal trends usually analyze these complex diagrams manually on paper, which is time-consuming and error-prone. In the last 15 years, researchers have thus proposed several approaches and tools to turn these diagrams into machine-readable models that can be processed by software tools. Yet, these tools lack sophisticated query interfaces and intuitive visualizations. We propose the method TOPNAV to navigate plant topology models and aid data analytics. The method supports systematic searching for elements and paths in topology models and feeding the results into analytical tools to facilitate statistical analyses. In a user study, an up to 90% time reduction was observed compared to manual P&ID analysis, while reducing errors significantly.

The role of simulation in the engineering and operation of modular machines and plants is becoming increasingly important. Still, both the creation and the maintenance of the models require a considerable manual effort. To address this problem, previous publications introduced an assistance system for the automatic composition and configuration of co-simulations, focusing on models for the commissioning phase. In this paper, the authors extend the concept of the assistance system to the operation phase. The goal is to optimize the simulation with respect to accuracy and runtime. Evolutionary algorithms are used to generate different model configurations, which fulfill both goals to different degrees, and suggest a suitable variant to the operator. The concept has been prototypically validated using an industrial application example.

Service-oriented automation systems play a key role in the context of modular production systems. Modular production systems can be build up from Process Equipment Assemblies (PEAs). PEA-spanning Automation Service Associations are able to increase the degree of adaptability in modular production systems. Their former implementation using central orchestration was subject to some limiting constraints. In this contribution, a choreography-based mechanism for Automation Service Association is presented, that represents a serious alternative to the central orchestration. The presented mechanism for Automation Service Choreographies consists of three software patterns which can be used in combination to meet the identified requirements. The software patterns as well as first implementation experiences with programmable logic controllers are presented.

Modular process plants enable the process industry to adapt to volatile and fluctuating markets. The preferred process technology concept for these market scenarios is realized through combining pre-engineered process equipment assemblies (PEA) from different manufacturers with standardized interfaces. While the flexibility gain for this type of plants is high, the design of the safety systems of these modular plants in terms of exchangeability and compatibility is challenging. One solution could be the development of a safety-interface for PEAs to create flexible and scalable safety systems. The principles of modular basic process control are analyzed and requirements with respect to safety design are discussed. The authors provide a differentiation of the intramodular safety concept of a single PEA from the intermodular safety concept of a complete modular plant. A concept for safe and modular interaction of PEAs in a modular plant is developed and additionally validated on a basic demonstrator. Finally, from these findings, standardization requirements are provided and aspects for further research are pointed out.

This contribution presents a novel approach for the automatic generation of simulation models for existing plants. The aim is to focus on brown-field projects for which the automation system has to be renewed. Whereas most research approaches for simulation based control code testing focus on green-field projects, the authors developed a method that considers the type of planning, as well as engineering data, which is given in brown-field projects. In addition, a prototype has been implemented. The paper presents the validation results of a first field study on a North Sea oil production plant - one of the largest oil discoveries in the UK North Sea.

Modern process plants are becoming more and more complex with high demands placed on design, engineering and operation. Throughout the life cycle of process plants, there is always the typical conflict involving costs, time and quality. One way of resolving this conflict is to employ simulation technology as it can be used to answer questions relating to engineering and operation earlier and with lower risks. To investigate the current and future role of simulation over the life cycle of a process plant, the authors conducted a global survey from July to October 2014. More than 200 persons participated in the survey. The results of the survey are described in this paper, and an initial technological roadmap derived showing a possible course for the future and creating a basis for discussion. The roadmap in this paper is based on action fields that need to be developed to enable a concurrent use of simulation over the complete life cycle of a process plant.

Interoperability of engineering tools, which is important for engineering efficiency, requires the openness of the tools for the import and/or export of engineering data. A metric to assess the openness of an engineering tool has been presented recently at IEEE ETFA 2012. This contribution reflects the methodology and focuses on the initial empirical assessment of the method with data from industrial practice, i.e., the comparison of openness evaluation of well-established engineering tools. The authors report evaluation results and discuss lessons learnt to guide improving the openness of automation tools for supporting more efficient engineering processes. Major results are: the measurement method has been found useful and usable in practice and pointed out strengths and weaknesses in 15 well-established engineering tools from 4 tool categories.

Interoperability describes the ability of engineering tools to collaborate across tool borders, organizational borders, and workflow phases. Therefore, it is considered as an important indicator for engineering efficiency, but is supported by today's industrial software only to some extent. The authors propose a novel method for the assessment of automation engineering tools, regarding their possibility to provide data for other software tools and to make use of the data provided by other tools. The authors have developed a metric to systematically assess and compare the openness of engineering tools. Thus, users can estimate better and for the first time based on objective criteria whether an engineering tool is suitable for a particular need within an engineering use case, and suppliers might find interesting hints towards possible improvements.

This contribution discusses the well-known paradox of today's approaches to standardizing of semantic models in automation engineering and proposes an evolutionary concept to resolve it. In this context, an overview of past and current standardization activities is presented which points out the existing barriers. Instead of aiming for a completely standardized neutral data model, the proposed approach actively supports data exchange with mixed neutral and proprietary data models. Hence, it utilizes the existing heterogeneity and the maturity of proprietary data models. In this context, the authors present a concept of maturity levels, which form milestones towards a stepwise evolution of a semantic standardization. Finally, this paper describes how this approach is technically implemented in AutomationML.

Interoperability of engineering tools describes their ability to collaborate with each other across their tool borders, company locations and workflow phases. Therefore it is considered as an important indicator for engineering efficiency - but it is rarely supported by today's heterogeneous industrial software. This paper motivates the need of interoperability, describes the state of the art and its issues, derives requirements and presents a new concept to overcome the mentioned issues. This approach introduces the concepts of Collaboration Objects, Data Ownership and Data Exchange Feedback Loops and utilizes a file based data exchange by means of AutomationML. Finally, the paper describes the developed workflow concept together with required software functionality for a collaboration middleware.