AS3 (Adaptive Safety and Security System)

TÜV SÜD's Adaptive Safety and Security System (AS3) is a revolutionary digital risk management solution backed by decades of extensive safety and security expertise. It integrates machine standard requirements with systems’ operational objectives into digital safety-security profiles to generate a zero-accident, zero-downtime strategy. 

Safety and industrial cybersecurity in IIoT architectures are intertwined, making it important to analyse and assess dependencies carefully. AS3’s guiding principle is the Enhanced Risk Assessment (ERA), a TÜV SÜD methodology merging both aspects into one holistic assessment. 

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) marks a profound paradigm shift in which humans, machines and systems are digitally interconnected and interoperate via IIoT devices. This enables increased levels of automation with new functionalities – two key ingredients for improving operational efficiency and generating new business value.

However, accidental and/or malicious incidents involving humans, machines and networks are increasingly common. This jeopardises the core mission of I4.0 stakeholders. Root causes lie mainly in insufficient understanding of the interdependencies between critical control functions and processes, and the associated underlying cyber-physical risks.

I4.0 systems need to be trustworthy. Trustworthiness is the ability of an I4.0 engineering solution to achieve its operational and business objectives in a safe, reliable, secure, and resilient manner throughout its entire life cycle. 

This is a complex task to be tackled by system designers, integrators, and operators from the design phase. On the one hand, systems need new functionalities to add flexibility, increase efficiency, optimise performance, and improve quality. On the other hand, systems must be reliable and shall not trigger unexpected events leading to accidents and/or downtime that undermines both operational and business objectives.

Digital systems demand a dynamic risk approach that helps optimise performance and maximise uptime without compromising compliance. TÜV SÜD’s AS3 is a patented adaptive safety solution to support the system’s operational objectives.

TÜV SÜD’s Adaptive Safety & Security System (AS3) is a patented adaptive safety system solution that overcomes the limitations of conventional risk assessment enabling automatic, in-situ and runtime evaluations and validations of safety functions and other critical control functions. Its capability to predict and handle undesired events supports system operators and owners in improving business continuity

This novel technique lies in the digital safety-security twins describing human-machine and machine-machine interactions in a specific application context. It remains relevant across a system's technical lifetime, spanning the processes of design, commissioning, operation, and maintenance.

AS3 is a joint engineering effort by our experts in close collaboration with the end-user. It embeds TÜV SÜD safety and industrial cybersecurity expertise modelled digitally that can be deployed as a built-in feature of end-user tools and platforms.;

Whether used for virtual simulations or during operations, AS3 helps navigate complex risk landscapes dynamically and efficiently, enhancing system safety, security, reliability, and resilience. This translates into stable operations, reduced downtime, and greater productivity.

AS3 supports I4.0 stakeholders in their quest to deliver high-performance and trustworthy engineering solutions.

The trustworthiness of an I4.0 solution depends on safety on the shop floor, reliability of production processes, OT security posture, and resilience.

The AS3 dashboard provides detailed information and will eventually raise warnings when a safety/reliability gap is detected. This can happen at runtime, or offline when checking system reconfigurations. AS3 offers timely notifications to the end-user when the system has safety/reliability/cybersecurity gaps.

We identify and prioritise cyber-physical risks leading to critical consequences (HSE, legal, operational, financial, reputational, etc.), and assess the relevant protective safety-security measures, jointly with the customer during the Enhanced Risk Assessment. We will translate the outcomes into digital safety-security twins (profiles) which are then processed  by AS3 inference engine to determine the safety/reliability/cybersecurity states of the system.

Disclaimer

AS3 is not a control tool and does not execute control functions. Its scope is limited to assessing the criticality of situations and monitoring controls and safety functions at runtime (risk monitoring and situational transparency) or offline (risk assessment and feedback during simulations).

AS3 outputs indicate the state of a system based on the safety/reliability of human-machine and machine-machine interactions. They are not valid for certification purposes.