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Chapter 11 Cyber Physical systems and security 285

has brought valuable opportunities to many industries including manufacturing. In the
move to the Industry 4.0 concept, a key feature, as noted in Section 11.3.1, is the
increasing amount of data captured in real time by a multitude of sensors.
Increasing number of sensors and other systems are becoming connected to the
Internet, when supported with the powerful storage and computing power available
from cloud computing, permits big data analysis models and algorithms to be run to
organise, analyse, and mine this raw data, to obtain valuable knowledge. In addition,
artificial intelligence with self-learning ability become more and more intelligent
through data analytics. In manufacturing, the big data involve a large volume of struc-
tured, semi-structured and unstructured data generated during a products lifecycle.
Through big data analysis based on cloud computing, manufacturers will be able find
the bottlenecks of manufacturing processes, identify the causes, impacts of, and
solutions to individual problems. In addition valuable information can be fed back to
product design and manufacturing from maintenance, repair or overhaul activities, to
improve the product in both the short and long term (Wong et al., 2008).

11.4 Risks due to the convergence IT and IACS systems

In recent years, computer-based industrial automation has evolved from systems and
products which were highly customised, based on proprietary hardware and software
designs, into systems and products that look, in many ways, very much like conventional
office-based computing systems. One of the key reasons for this change is that many
IACS systems and products have migrated onto and can be incorporated into
commercial platforms and IT technologies, for example x86 computers and servers, MS
Windows operating systems, TCP/IP and Ethernet networking. For example, drive
manufacturers can supply axis controller (in some cases up to eight axes) that can be
directly plugged in the PCI bus found in all personal desk top computers.
For these reasons a significant number of organizations have put their office-based IT
departments in charge of supporting their computer-based industrial automation
systems. While it could be argued that there are no fundamental differences between
Industrial Information of Things, DCS and SCADA systems and many office-based IT
systems, except the applications being run and the associated peripherals. As discussed
in Section 2.7.6, the designers, operators and maintainers of IACS has significant
responsibilities regarding Health and Safety issues. This convergence of responsibilities
can lead to serious problems in both the long and short term, due to the loss of specific
IACS knowledge and underestimation or the risks associated with any industrial or
manufacturing processes, Table 11.3 identifies some of the unforeseen consequences
that an organisation may face when IACS are compared to information processing
systems.