Modeling IT Availability Risks in Smart Factories

Daniel Miehle (), Björn Häckel (), Stefan Pfosser () and Jochen Übelhör ()
Additional contact information
Daniel Miehle: Technical University of Munich
Björn Häckel: University of Applied Sciences Augsburg
Stefan Pfosser: BMK Group
Jochen Übelhör: University of Augsburg

Business & Information Systems Engineering: The International Journal of WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK, 2020, vol. 62, issue 4, No 5, 323-345

Abstract: Abstract In the course of the ongoing digitalization of production, production environments have become increasingly intertwined with information and communication technology. As a consequence, physical production processes depend more and more on the availability of information networks. Threats such as attacks and errors can compromise the components of information networks. Due to the numerous interconnections, these threats can cause cascading failures and even cause entire smart factories to fail due to propagation effects. The resulting complex dependencies between physical production processes and information network components in smart factories complicate the detection and analysis of threats. Based on generalized stochastic Petri nets, the paper presents an approach that enables the modeling, simulation, and analysis of threats in information networks in the area of connected production environments. Different worst-case threat scenarios regarding their impact on the operational capability of a close-to-reality information network are investigated to demonstrate the feasibility and usability of the approach. Furthermore, expert interviews with an academic Petri net expert and two global leading companies from the automation and packaging industry complement the evaluation from a practical perspective. The results indicate that the developed artifact offers a promising approach to better analyze and understand availability risks, cascading failures, and propagation effects in information networks in connected production environments.

Keywords: Smart factory; Information network; Information network analysis; IT availability risks; Petri nets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12599-019-00610-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:binfse:v:62:y:2020:i:4:d:10.1007_s12599-019-00610-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/12599

DOI: 10.1007/s12599-019-00610-6

Access Statistics for this article

Business & Information Systems Engineering: The International Journal of WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK is currently edited by Martin Bichler

More articles in Business & Information Systems Engineering: The International Journal of WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK from Springer, Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().