SERENA-IIoT
SEcure and REliable Networked Architecture for Industrial Internet of Things digital transformationg

Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale (PRIN) 2022

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The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) paradigm has tremendous potential for digital transformation in European industries by accelerating Industry 4.0 automation, reducing costs and time of industrial activities, and improving the efficiency of manufacturing and maintenance processes. Devices in IIoT environments continuously generate huge amounts of data, encompassing event and system logs, network traces, sensing data. Data analysis - today increasingly performed with Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques - allows transforming them into valuable information for operating tasks, controlling devices, and detecting errors/failures.

IIoT architectures offer the possibility to distribute data analysis tasks across various layers, from intermediate edge/fog nodes, to process part of collected data close to the sources, to cloud-based services, for intensive processing. Reliability and security represent two main requirements for IIoT adoption. Faults, delays, incorrect data, and data losses may lead to severe consequences, such as processes misbehavior; vulnerabilities to cyber-attacks, including fraudulent information transactions or even causing damages to the infrastructures, cannot be afforded in, especially in critical systems.

Despite the progress that engineering techniques for reliability monitoring and security have made, their suitability on edge/fog layers in an IIoT environment is still a hot research topic. Wireless connection of sensors/devices and resource limitations (e.g., battery, memory, processing capability) add complexity to the integration of monitoring and security mechanisms. IIoT architectures require new solutions or tailoring existing techniques towards reliable and secure industrial control systems.

In such a vision, the SERENA-IIoT (SEcure and REliable Networked Architecture for Industrial Internet of Things digital transformation) project will contribute to the IIoT areas:

- Architecture, addressing the need for distributed and multi-layered IIoT architecture supporting data analytics and AI techniques towards the edge to efficiently collect and analyze the vast amount of data generated by IIoT devices;
- Reliability, aiming at timely identifying errors/failures occurring during the IIoT environment operation, leveraging lightweight AI-based monitoring strategies considering the resource and time constraints of IIoT systems;
- Security, providing tailored techniques for the supervision of activities in an IIoT system, managing access to resources, enforcing security policies, detecting attacks, and counteracting them.