Digital Twin-based Cyber-Attack Detection Framework for Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

<p>Smart manufacturing (SM) systems utilize run-time data to improve productivity via intelligent decision-making and analysis mechanisms on both machine and system levels. The increased adoption of cyber-physical systems in SM leads to the comprehensive framework of cyber-physical manufacturing systems (CPMS) where data-enabled decision-making mechanisms are coupled with cyber-physical resources on the plant floor. Due to their cyber-physical nature, CPMS are susceptible to cyber-attacks that may cause harm to the manufacturing system, products, or even the human workers involved in this context. Therefore, detecting cyber-attacks efficiently and timely is a crucial step toward implementing and securing high-performance CPMS in practice. This paper addresses two key challenges to CPMS cyber-attack detection. The first challenge is distinguishing expected anomalies in the system from cyber-attacks. The second challenge is the identification of cyber-attacks during the transient response of CPMS due to closed-loop controllers. Digital twin (DT) technology emerges as a promising solution for providing additional insights into the physical process (twin) by leveraging run-time data, models, and analytics. In this work, we propose a DT framework for detecting cyber-attacks in CPMS during controlled transient behavior as well as expected anomalies of the physical process. We present a DT framework and provide details on structuring the architecture to support cyber-attack detection. Additionally, we present an experimental case study on off-the-shelf 3D printers to detect cyber-attacks utilizing the proposed DT framework to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.</p>