A Fog Based Approach for Hazards Differentiation in an IIoT Scenario

Industrial control systems (ICS) are applied in many critical infrastructures. Reducing reconfiguration time after hazard leads to safety improvement, so it is one of the most important objectives in these systems. Hazards can be due to the “system failure” or “cyber-attacks” factors. One of the procedures that can reduce the reconfiguration time is determining as soon as possible the cause of hazards based on the above mentioned factors. Differentiation of attack from failure without redundant data in addition to data from the system sensors is not possible. With advent of the IoT as IIoT, a condition is developed to provide the required redundant data; however, by increasing the number of IIoT devices within a factory, the generated data volume becomes too large. In this paper we describe a fog-based approach applied in a factory to deal with such increasing complexity. We compare the proposed method with a traditional cloud-based solution. According to the results, the proposed method leads to a reduction of 60% lost time in the recovery reconfiguration step of the system.