Control over Blockchain for Data-Driven Fault Tolerant Control in Industry 4.0

The integration of information and communication technologies in industrial control systems brings enhanced automation options for Process Monitoring (PM) and control in Industry 4.0. However, it suffers from various cyber-security challenges due to the complex industrial environment and integrity of data logs for big data analytics. In this paper, a data-driven blockchain-based Fault-Tolerant Control (FTC) is proposed to address these issues. Blockchain ensures the integrity of data logs via its immutable ledger and decentralized architecture. Moreover, the blockchain smart contract functionality, embedded with attack detection, identification, and reconfiguration conditions realizes FTC and undertakes the mitigation response in case of cyber-attacks. The process monitoring mechanism embodies the principal component analysis technique and observer models trained via neural networks to detect an attack and identify the compromised component. An industrial benchmark Tennessee Eastman (TE) process is considered a case study to investigate the performance of the proposed framework. Two kinds of integrity attacks are applied to the sensors of the TE process with simulation results demonstrating the effectiveness of the method in mitigating the adversarial effect of the applied attacks on the overall system performance. The results are encouraging for the wider adoption of the control over the blockchain concept.