ERIGrid Holistic Test Description for Validating Cyber-Physical Energy Systems

Smart energy solutions aim to modify and optimise the operation of existing energy infrastructure. Such cyber-physical technology must be mature before deployment to the actual infrastructure, and competitive solutions will have to be compliant to standards still under development. Achieving this technology readiness and harmonisation requires reproducible experiments and appropriately realistic testing environments. Such testbeds for multi-domain cyber-physical experiments are complex in and of themselves. This work addresses a method for the scoping and design of experiments where both testbed and solution each require detailed expertise. This empirical work first revisited present test description approaches, developed a newdescription method for cyber-physical energy systems testing, and matured it by means of user involvement. The new Holistic Test Description (HTD) method facilitates the conception, deconstruction and reproduction of complex experimental designs in the domains of cyber-physical energy systems. This work develops the background and motivation, offers a guideline and examples to the proposed approach, and summarises experience from three years of its application.This work received funding in the European Community’s Horizon 2020 Program (H2020/2014–2020) under project “ERIGrid” (Grant Agreement No. 654113)

Review of Open Source Simulators in ICS/IIoT Security Context

In industrial control systems (ICS), simulation has found widespread use during system design and in tuning process control parameters or exploring the effects of new control algorithms. Simulation enables the assessment of performance at scale and allows research to be conducted by those with limited access to real physical infrastructures. However, as ICSs are often no longer isolated from other networks and the internet, hence are subject to security and safety issues, simulation is also required to understand the issues and their solution. To foster transparent, collaborative and cost-effective studies, demonstrations, and solution development, and attract the broadest interest base, simulation is indeed critical and Open Source is a good way to go since simulators in this category are less expensive to access, install, and use, and can be run with general purpose (non-proprietary) computing equipment and setups. Findings This research presents the following key findings: 1. A lot of Open Source simulation tools exist and span applications areas such as communications and sensor networks (C&WSNs), ICS/SCADA, and IIoT. 2. The functional structures and characteristics that appear common in Open Source simulators include: supported licence types, programming languages, operating systems platforms, user interface types, and available documentation and types. 3. Typical research around Open Source simulators is built around modelling, analysis and optimisation of operations in relations to factors such as flexibility, mobility, scalability, and active user support. No single Open Source simulator addresses all conceivable characteristics. While some are strong in specific contexts relative to their development, they are often weak in other purpose-based research capabilities, especially in the context of IoT. 4. Most of the reviewed Open Source tools are not designed to address security contexts. The few that address security such as SCADASim only consider very limited contexts such as testing and evaluating Denial-of-Service (DoS), Man-in-the-middle (Mitm), Eavesdropping, and Spoofing attacks. Recommendations The following key recommendations are presented: 1. Future developments of Open Source simulators (especially for IIoT) should explore the potential for functionalities that can enable the integration of diverse simulators and platforms to achieve an encompassing setup. 2. Developers should explore the capabilities of generic simulators towards achieving architectures with expansible capabilities into multi-class domains, support easier and faster modelling of complex systems, and which can attract varied users and contributors. 3. Functional characteristics such as; ease of use, degree of community acceptance and use, and suitability for industrial applications, should also be considered as selection and development criteria, and to emphasise simulator effectiveness. This can support consistency, credibility, and simulation system relevance within a domain that is continually evolving. 4. Future Open Source simulation projects developments should consider and adopt the more common structural attributes including; Platform Type, Open Source Licence Type, Programming Language, User Interfaces, Documentation, and Communication Types. These should be further complemented by appropriate editorial controls spanning quality coding, revision control and effective project disseminations and management, to boost simulation tool credibility and wide acceptance. 5. The range of publication dates (earliest to latest) for: citations, code commits, and number of contributors associated to Open Source simulator projects can also support the decision for interests and adoption of specific Open Source projects. 6. Research objectives for ICS/IIoT Open Source simulators should also include security performance and optimisation with considerations towards enhancing confidentiality, integrity and availability. 7. Further studies should explore the evaluation of security topics which could be addressed by simulation – more specifically, proposing how this may be achieved and identifying what can't be addressed by simulation. Investigations into simulation frameworks that can allow multi-mode simulations to be configured and operated are also required. Research into Industry 4.0 System-of-Systems (SoS) security evaluations, dependency, and cascading impacts method or analysis is another area of importanc

Ontology-driven conceptual modeling: A'systematic literature mapping and review

All rights reserved. Ontology-driven conceptual modeling (ODCM) is still a relatively new research domain in the field of information systems and there is still much discussion on how the research in ODCM should be performed and what the focus of this research should be. Therefore, this article aims to critically survey the existing literature in order to assess the kind of research that has been performed over the years, analyze the nature of the research contributions and establish its current state of the art by positioning, evaluating and interpreting relevant research to date that is related to ODCM. To understand and identify any gaps and research opportunities, our literature study is composed of both a systematic mapping study and a systematic review study. The mapping study aims at structuring and classifying the area that is being investigated in order to give a general overview of the research that has been performed in the field. A review study on the other hand is a more thorough and rigorous inquiry and provides recommendations based on the strength of the found evidence. Our results indicate that there are several research gaps that should be addressed and we further composed several research opportunities that are possible areas for future research

Assessing and augmenting SCADA cyber security: a survey of techniques

SCADA systems monitor and control critical infrastructures of national importance such as power generation and distribution, water supply, transportation networks, and manufacturing facilities. The pervasiveness, miniaturisations and declining costs of internet connectivity have transformed these systems from strictly isolated to highly interconnected networks. The connectivity provides immense benefits such as reliability, scalability and remote connectivity, but at the same time exposes an otherwise isolated and secure system, to global cyber security threats. This inevitable transformation to highly connected systems thus necessitates effective security safeguards to be in place as any compromise or downtime of SCADA systems can have severe economic, safety and security ramifications. One way to ensure vital asset protection is to adopt a viewpoint similar to an attacker to determine weaknesses and loopholes in defences. Such mind sets help to identify and fix potential breaches before their exploitation. This paper surveys tools and techniques to uncover SCADA system vulnerabilities. A comprehensive review of the selected approaches is provided along with their applicability

Methodology to Evaluate WSN Simulators: Focusing on Energy Consumption Awareness

ISBN: 978-1-925953-09-1International audienceNowadays, there exists a large number of available network simulators, that differ in their design, goals, and characteristics. Users who have to decide which simulator is the most appropriate for their particular requirements, are today lost, faced with a panoply of disparate and diverse simulators. Hence, it is obvious the need for establishing guidelines that support users in the tasks of selecting and customizing a simulator to suit their preferences and needs. In previous works, we proposed a generic and novel methodological approach to evaluate network simulators, considering a set of qualitative and quantitative criteria. However, it lacks criteria related to Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Thus, the aim of this work is three fold: (i) extend the previous proposed methodology to include the evaluation of WSN simulators, such as energy consumption modelling and scalability; (ii) elaborate a study of the state of the art of WSN simulators, with the intention of identifying the most used and cited in scientific articles; and (iii) demonstrate the suitability of our novel methodology by evaluating and comparing three of the most cited simulators. Our novel methodology provides researchers with an evaluation tool that can be used to describe and compare WSN simulators in order to select the most appropriate one for a given scenario

A Design Pattern for Executable DSML

Model executability is now a key concern in model-driven engineering, mainly to support early validation and verification (V&V). Some approaches have allowed to weave executability into metamodels, defining executable domain-specific modeling languages (DSML). Then, model validation may be achieved by direct interpretation of the conforming models. Other approaches address model executability by model compilation, allowing to reuse the virtual machines or V&V tools existing in the target domain. Nevertheless, systematic methods are not available to help the language designer in the definition of such an execution semantics and related support tools. For instance, simulators are mostly hand-crafted in a tool specific manner for each DSML. In this paper, we propose to reify the elements commonly used to support execution in a DSML. We infer a design pattern (called Executable DSML pattern) providing a general reusable solution for the expression of the executability concerns in DSML. It favors flexibility and improves reusability in the definition of semantics-based tools for DSML. We illustrate how this pattern can be applied to V&V and models at runtime, and give insights on the development of generic and generative tools for model animators

Ontology–based Representation of Simulation Models

Ontologies have been used in a variety of domains for multiple purposes such as establishing common terminology, organizing domain knowledge and describing domain in a machine-readable form. Moreover, ontologies are the foundation of the Semantic Web and often semantic integration is achieved using ontology. Even though simulation demonstrates a number of similar characteristics to Semantic Web or semantic integration, including heterogeneity in the simulation domain, representation and semantics, the application of ontology in the simulation domain is still in its infancy. This paper proposes an ontology-based representation of simulation models. The goal of this research is to facilitate comparison among simulation models, querying, making inferences and reuse of existing simulation models. Specifically, such models represented in the domain simulation engine environment serve as an information source for their representation as instances of an ontology. Therefore, the ontology-based representation is created from existing simulation models in their proprietary file formats, consequently eliminating the need to perform the simulation modeling directly in the ontology. The proposed approach is evaluated on a case study involving the I2Sim interdependency simulator