Monitoring Safety Critical Systems’ Situational Awareness (Self-Funded Students Only)

Safety-critical systems (SCS) are considered prone to high-risk hazards and components’ failure. Any undesirable and unexpected incidents or events can result into severe damage to the system components, serious injury or death to the people, or other environmental losses. Critical manufacturing, which is a critical infrastructure, links different elements altogether that transform the traditional manufacturing into the smart factory (Factory 4.0). These elements are equipment or IoT devices, personnel, monitoring and maintenance activities, and communication medium. The aim of this project is to improve the situational awareness of such systems through life safety, environmental monitoring, security, and mass notification.

The research objectives are to find answers of the questions like: (i) how can we identify the problems or issues in-advance (such as an equipment failure, overheating machine, gas leak, and broken water pipe) before they occur in such a complex system?, (ii) how to evaluate a situation weather it is under control or an emergency, and how to build advance alert capability?, and (iii) how to make the best use of the security controls implemented altogether to secure this massive infrastructure?

Indicative Deliverables:
• Surveys on risk, impact and state of the art: safety-critical systems situational awareness
• Building capability: identifying the issues and threat modelling, monitoring techniques and creating advance alert situations
• Develop AI-driven distributed techniques for cyber security and assessment engines
• Incorporating the developed techniques and capabilities into a tool that offers a situational awareness alerting platform
• Academic technical publications

Please contact Dr. Neetesh Saxena ([email protected]) to discuss this project.
Supervisor Profile: https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/1724111-saxena-neetesh