Safety and Cybersecurity of Chemical Processes
Traditionally, the operational safety of chemical processes has been addressed through process design considerations and through a hierarchical, independent design of control and safety systems. However, the consistent accidents throughout chemical process plant history (including several high-profile disasters in the last decade) have motivated researchers to design control systems that explicitly account for process operational safety considerations. On the other hand, cybersecurity has become increasingly important in chemical process industries in recent years as cyber-attacks that have grown in sophistication and frequency have become another leading cause of process safety incidents. While the traditional methods of handling cyber-attacks in control systems still rely partly on human analysis and mainly fall into the area of fault diagnosis, the intelligence of cyber-attacks and their accessibility to control system information have recently motivated researchers to develop cyber-attack detection and resilient operation control strategies to address directly cybersecurity concerns.
In this talk, we will present our research work on the design of advanced control systems that improve process operational safety and cybersecurity for chemical processes. Specifically, we will first present an advanced control framework that integrates safety constraints with a case study of large-scale chemical processes under integrated process control and safety systems. Then, we will discuss several ways to improve cybersecurity in industrial control systems, including detection, recovery, security by design, and secure data access.