Integrating security evaluations into virtual commissioning

Virtual commissioning is an important part of modern plant and factory organization. Research in this area focuses on safety, reliability, liveness, and repeatability. Security evaluations are currently not considered in virtual commissioning research and applications. Vulnerabilities in controller software and in the implementation of industrial equipment are receiving increased attention from attackers and cyber criminals. This is due to the rapidly advancing interconnection in modern, digital factories. This increase of the possible attack surface needs to be addressed as a part of comprehensive risk analysis within the domain of Industrie 4.0. Virtual commissioning, as an established process, is well-suited to address this lack of security evaluation. In this work, we propose a conceptual architecture for a simulation testbed that can be integrated in the virtual commissioning toolchain and show how to model and evaluate industrial equipment.