Future Industrial Networks

Important results from the project

The FIN project has enabled an efficient employment of new technologies and innovations in the process industry by reducing obstacles to the efficient exchange of information between IT and OT in a common infrastructure. FIN project has aimed to further develop today´s network infrastructures into the next generation of network infrastructure that enables easy and efficient integration of new technologies and business opportunities beyond what the automation pyramid allows today.

Expected long term effects

The outcomes of the FIN project have been distributed in terms of technical reports, scientific publications, and patents describing use-cases, critical requirements and a reasoning against how future industrial networks should be designed. Documentation of identified safety requirements and identified safety techniques proposed to deal with separation, authentication, and authorization along with expected performance. Documentation of traffic profiling which is used as an indicator for possible anomaly detection.

Approach and implementation

We have designed mechanisms for migrating and consolidating existing traffic, and recommendations on life cycle issues in consolidated IT / OT networks. We have collected the data from a production environment at Iggesund Paperboard and designed methods and mechanisms to ensure performance, reliability, predictability, and performance indicators in consolidated IT / OT networks. We further verify the proposed methods through theoretical analysis and extensive real testbed experiments in the lab environment.