Providing Autonomous Capabilities for Evolving SCADA (PACES)

SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) has proved to be a powerful and successful technology. Across the world SCADA systems are deeply integrated into the large scale infrastructures used in power generation, power transmission, radioactive waste processing, manufacturing, refining, water treatment, space exploration and various military applications. Traditionally SCADA implementations adopt a centralised architecture, either across one single geographical site, or across multiple sites using proprietary communications protocols. In spite of this trend to distributed solutions the supervisory control function continues to be performed at a centralised location, typically supervised by trained personnel using compliant HMI (Human-Machine Interface) tools. This centralised architecture presents overwhelming problems for system designers needing to integrate ever more diverse components and to scale to larger, more complex deployments. Moreover, this increasing complexity can realistically only be achieved through the adoption of autonomous or intelligent system components that can replace the supervisory function provided by humans.

More recent trends show SCADA systems incorporating widely available COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) software to deliver functionality and adopting recognised communications standards such as TCP/IP to facilitate integration and remote administration. The use of COTS increases available functionality and robustness but introduces new vulnerabilities. Attackers can exploit their knowledge of such widely available components and attacks can be 'designed' in ways previously not possible with the earlier proprietary systems. Closely linked to security is the need for fault tolerance. Here too we must develop intelligent SCADA systems that can self-monitor and detect anomalous behaviour (resulting from malicious attack or component fault) and invoke response that protects the goals of the whole system.

The next generation of SCADA systems must develop a set of autonomous and intelligent capabilities to address a number of pressing requirements. Problems presented by increasing process complexity, advances in sensor technologies, the increasing demand for integration with other enterprise solutions, increasingly inadequate security protection and a higher required standard of fault tolerance must all be solved. To provide solutions to these problems the proposed research focuses on the development of a novel Multi-Agent System (MAS) architecture. This architecture is integrated with an advanced event reasoning framework that can fully exploit sensor data and domain knowledge, including treatment of inherent uncertainties, incompleteness and inconsistency to autonomously infer system state and crucially to inform human and autonomous decision makers in the system.

Increased autonomy presents new challenges of system security. The next generation of autonomous SCADA must detect, diagnose and respond in real-time to security breaches and anomalous behaviours. The proposed research exploits new Deep Packet Inspection capabilities and network traffic analysis to develop a unique 'cyber-sensor', providing visibility of overall system health and integrity to human operators and autonomous components. Brought together, these novel research outputs will equip the next generation of autonomous SCADA systems with the capabilities to respond in real-time to evolving situations, self-awareness of changes and abnormal behaviours, fault and noise tolerance, and real-time decision support.

Beyond the immediate academic beneficiaries it is anticipated that the following groups will also benefit from the research undertaken:

(1) Corporate and Governmental Bodies: Bodies tasked with predicting future trends in large-scale autonomous and intelligent control systems, such as next generation SCADA will gain insight into emerging capabilities, opportunities for exploitation, security planning and pathways to integration. We believe all six industrial partners currently linked with this call (BAE Systems, NNL, Sellafield Ltd, Cisco, SciSys and Network Rail) will have opportunity to benefit from the findings of this proposal.

(2) UK PLC: The increasing scale and complexity of industrialisation in various parts of the globe and the pressures for increased efficiency in such processes presents an opportunity for the UK economy to place itself at the centre of a vast and expanding sector facilitating such large scale infrastructures offering autonomous and intelligent implementations.

(3) World Citizens: The pervasiveness of supervisory control systems such as SCADA mean that efficiency improvements in these systems have far reaching effects. Efficiencies in service delivery and security inevitably enable improved, cheaper production and delivery of goods and services to global citizens. These efficiencies could manifest themselves in many areas such as reliable treatment and distribution of drinking water, reliable fault-tolerant treatment of nuclear waste, efficient power distribution to electrified railways facilitating cheaper rail travel, increased confidence in the security of critical national infrastructure installations.

The proposers envisage that the proposed research will deliver technology classified at TRL4 (Technology Readiness Level 4) on completion of the programme in 36 months from the start date. The technology will be demonstrable via full scale simulations. Models will be ready for test or evaluation in field scenarios.