Adaptive safety and security

Safety risk assessment in Industry 4.0

While the introduction of adaptive and interconnected configurations can vastly improve facilities’ performance and efficiency levels, the complexity of the risk landscape increases. In a dynamic Industry 4.0 production environment, safety hazards and cyber threats emerge dynamically in line with the adaptive set-up. Changes can be new assets, e.g. machines or components added into the system; new properties of existing assets, e.g. new workpieces or products, new material properties; new environmental conditions (operating space, barriers, clearances, human presence, etc.).

Effective risk assessment, determined by actual interdependencies, shall be performed for each new configuration to reduce liability risk. How can changes in the system be handled timely and effectively while minimising both safety-critical downtime and operational stops? The answer is embedded in the digital representation of the manufacturing system.

Event-triggered risk assessment and automated safety validation

To ensure stable and safe operations in a dynamic production environment, the manufacturer would need new and holistic solutions.

• Reduce downtimes for planned changes (e.g. new equipment): simulate new configurations prior to installation to allow for smooth integration and commissioning.
• Reduce safety-related downtimes and stops during operations: anticipate possible changes to automatically assess and validate any interaction within the system at runtime; enable optimized safety configurations based on real environment and application-specific limits, rather than worst-case assumptions according to the conventional safety assessment approach.

Preparation based on a thorough set of data is key. Furthermore, these solutions require suitable supporting platforms and digital representations characterizing the specific use-case.

Today, supporting platforms for operators of smart manufacturing systems are focused on functional optimisation to make the most of I4.0 advantages in terms of increased flexibility and efficiency. However, if the underlying safety and security gaps that arise in dynamically changing I4.0 environments are not taken into consideration, the operator does not have the full picture, hence exposed to liability risk and loss of productivity. 

The current I4.0 information models for Asset Administration Shell (such as RAMI 4.0) pose a similar challenge as they lack the safety and security layers.

Adaptive safety AND SECURITY by TÜV SÜD

To improve the speed and flexibility of risk assessment in a smart manufacturing context, TÜV SÜD has developed and patented a method to automatically evaluate compliance to safety and security requirements: Adaptive Safety & Security. By embedding pre-defined safety and security profiles in the system’s digital twins, the solution facilitates automatic and event-triggered risk assessment based on actual hazards and cyber threats at the time of interaction. Furthermore, the solution can be used to simulate planned changes to the system, thereby conducting risk assessment and safety validations prior to installation. In other words, the adaptive safety and security solution can be used offline as a safety simulation tool, or at runtime during operations.