Developing Conceptualizations of Operational Technology and Service Quality for Critical Infrastructures – »Devcon«

Abstract

Critical infrastructures (CIs) such as energy grids, communication networks or transportation systems are the essential backbone of any societies’ social and economic processes. Providing appropriate techniques to monitor the efficient and safe operation of their underlying Operational Technology (aka. OTM) is naturally of paramount importance. One crucial challenge is, however, that a CI’s OT is continuously evolving on a high pace, leading to massive heterogeneities, interdependencies and interoperability problems, thereby making OTM and integrative service quality hard to achieve. The research goal of our project »DevCon« is therefore to push forward appropriate techniques to facilitate OTM and integrative service quality even in face of the evolving nature inherent in this kind of systems. In particular, to overcome heterogeneities while explicating interdependencies and ensuring interoperability, conceptualizations of OT objects and service quality are put forward, providing the basis for a pivotal knowledge base. For this, an innovative approach is followed by synergistically combining inductive methods in terms of machine learning and deductive methods in terms of semantic technologies.