The potential of self-adaptive software systems in industrial control systems

Abstract

New generations of industrial control systems offer higher performance, are networked and can be controlled remotely. Following this progress, the complexity of such systems increases through heterogeneous systems, hardware and more capable software. This may lead to an increase of unreliability and insecurity. Self-adaptive software systems offer a mean of dealing with complexity by monitoring a control system, detecting anomalies and adapting the control system to problems. Regarding such methods, industrial control systems have the advantage of being less dynamic. The network topology is fixed, devices rarely change, and the functionality of all the resources is known in principle. In this work, we examine this advantage and present the potential of self-adaptive software systems. The context of the presented work is control systems for hydropower units.