Designing Modular and Redundant Cyber Architectures for Process Control: Lessons Learned

An architecture was recently proposed to protect the power grid, in the context of an European project. The design of the architecture, guided by an analysis of the evolution of critical information infrastructures, tried to be as generic as possible, with a view of possibly serving as reference cyber architecture for process control infrastructures. The need for a new architecture is explained by the fact that cyber architectures for process control, despite being basically physical processes controlled by computers interconnected by networks, exhibit a potentially huge cost of failure in socio-economic terms, thus bringing extremely demanding requirements, which have not been previously found together in a same class of computer-based systems.