An idea of using Digital Twin to perform the functional safety and cybersecurity analysis

Abstract

Current power plants, including nuclear power plants are based on digital technology. According to the Industry 4.0 concepts, similarly to the intelligent manufacturing for new factories, the use of digital twins for power plants is expected to progress. Researchers do the safety and cybersecurity analysis from various perspectives utilize different approaches, e.g. on the safety side, the FMEA (Failure Mode & Effect Analysis), FMECA (Failure mode, Effects and Criticality Analysis) are recommended by FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) to do the reliability analysis. On the cybersecurity part, researchers do the analysis only with a focus on the communication protocol, the code/memory level or on the system functionality. We have addressed refueling machines as an example for the joint consideration of functional safety and cybersecurity in previous publications. Whereas in this paper, we propose to do a functionality and cybersecurity analysis based on the digital twin of an ICS (Industrial Control System). We take the refueling machine as an example and discuss how to twin the refueling machine with high detail firstly. In addition, the possible way of how to model the ICS is discussed, e.g. the Automation ML will be used to describe the system, the OPC UA will be applied to implement the communication. Then the feasibility and benefit of analyzing the system functionality and cybersecurity based on the digital twin model are discussed.