DOTS-LCCI - Dependable Off-The-Shelf based middleware systems for Large-scale Complex Critical Infrastructures

Large scale Complex Critical Infrastructures (LCCIs), such as water and power supply plants, and transport infrastructures (e.g., airports and seaports), play a key role into several fundamental human activities. It is easy to think about their economic and social impact: the consequences of an outage can be catastrophic in terms of efficiency, economical losses, consumer dissatisfaction, and even indirect harm to people and deaths. Currently, LCCIs make extensive usage of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) (e.g., computing systems, communication networks, and sensing hardware), and especially software systems for LCCI interconnection, control, and management, in charge of providing support for advanced monitoring and control facilities. These systems have to be highly resilient in order to reduce the risk of LCCI catastrophic failures. Nevertheless, the resiliency of future LCCI is compromised by several factors. First, these systems are more and more conceived as the composition of several Off-The-Shelf (OTS) items and/or legacy subsystems, which increase the probability of failures occurrences, due to unexpected or erroneous modes of operation. Second, they have been designed without considering that their size would have significantly grown, crossing national boundaries, and that their operational environment, originally planned to be "closed", would become "open" to the world to allow interoperability among LCCIs and remote accesses and control. This implies that the both accidental events and malicious attacks should be taken into account. The DOTS-LCCI research project aims to define novel middleware technologies, models, and methods to assure and assess the resiliency level of current and future OTS-based LCCIs, to diagnose faults in real time, and to tolerate them by means of dynamic reconfiguration. Assuring the resiliency level of LCCIs is crucial to reduce, with known probabilities, the occurrence of catastrophic failures, and consequently, to adopt proper diagnosis and reconfiguration strategies. Project efforts will progress according to three main directions: i) Distributed architectures for LCCIs, their components (OTS and legacy), and their resiliency requirements will be studied, in order to define algorithms and middleware architectures for improving dependability attributes of future LCCIs; ii) Strategies for on-line diagnosis and reconfiguration will be studied and defined, specifically tailored for OTS-based LCCIs, according to the resiliency assurance requirements; iii) Tools and techniques for modeling and evaluating LCCIs will be devised. Several works exist in the literature about these research themes. However, existing solutions are usually applied to simpler and closed system. Based on the experiences of research units in several real-world contexts, the innovative and challenging aspect is to apply these strategies, or to define novel ones, in the context of complex, evolvable, and extremely heterogeneous systems, which will compose future LCCI systems. The proposed strategies will be applied to two crucial elements of LCCIs: 1) Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, being them massively deployed in critical contexts to monitor and control infrastructure processes. Without loss of generality, the project will consider LCCIs composed as a set of SCADA systems interconnected by means of a communication middleware; 2) The interconnecting middleware, that plays the role of a glue technology across the overall system. This component represents a main concern for the dependability of the LCCI. In particular, Event-Driven Architectures (EDA) will be considered, since they result very effective for the loose interconnection of OTS items, due to the adoption of the publish/subscribe communication paradigm. Particular effort will also be devoted to the definition of EDAs specifically tailored for resilient LCCIs. The different objectives addressed by DOTS-LCCI call for distinguished know-how in different fields, such as diagnosis, reconfiguration, modeling, evaluation, EDA architectures, and SCADA systems, thus making necessary the creation of a research consortium among complementary units. This will enable exchange and cross-fertilization of research interests, and will lead to the increase of knowledge on LCCIs design and management, and to novel techniques for their engineering. Also, project activities will benefit from the close synergy with research efforts and industrial collaborations already active in the research labs of the units composing the consortium.