Mitigating Safety Concerns and Profit/Production Losses for Chemical Process Control Systems under Cyberattacks via Design/Control Methods

Helen Durand and Matthew Wegener
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Helen Durand: Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Wayne State University, 5050 Anthony Wayne Drive, Detroit, MI 48202, USA
Matthew Wegener: Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Wayne State University, 5050 Anthony Wayne Drive, Detroit, MI 48202, USA

Mathematics, 2020, vol. 8, issue 4, 1-38

Abstract: One of the challenges for chemical processes today, from a safety and profit standpoint, is the potential that cyberattacks could be performed on components of process control systems. Safety issues could be catastrophic; however, because the nonlinear systems definition of a cyberattack has similarities to a nonlinear systems definition of faults, many processes have already been instrumented to handle various problematic input conditions. Also challenging is the question of how to design a system that is resilient to attacks attempting to impact the production volumes or profits of a company. In this work, we explore a process/equipment design framework for handling safety issues in the presence of cyberattacks (in the spirit of traditional HAZOP thinking), and present a method for bounding the profit/production loss which might be experienced by a plant under a cyberattack through the use of a sufficiently conservative operating strategy combined with the assumption that an attack detection method with characterizable time to detection is available.

Keywords: process control; process design; cybersecurity; process operational safety; nonlinear dynamic systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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