An Ontological Metamodel for Cyber-Physical System Safety, Security, and Resilience Coengineering

TL;DR

This paper introduces an ontological metamodel that enhances cyber-physical system design by integrating safety, security, and resilience considerations, improving model cohesion, scalability, and mission-oriented defense strategies.

Contribution

It proposes a novel ontological metamodel that augments existing industry models to better capture safety, security, and resilience relationships in cyber-physical systems.

Findings

Enhanced model cohesion and scalability.

Improved integration of safety, security, and resilience considerations.

Successful demonstration with an oil and gas pipeline model.

Abstract

System complexity has become ubiquitous in the design, assessment, and implementation of practical and useful cyber-physical systems. This increased complexity is impacting the management of models necessary for designing cyber-physical systems that are able to take into account a number of ``-ilities'', such that they are safe and secure and ultimately resilient to disruption of service. We propose an ontological metamodel for system design that augments an already existing industry metamodel to capture the relationships between various model elements and safety, security, and resilient considerations. Employing this metamodel leads to more cohesive and structured modeling efforts with an overall increase in scalability, usability, and unification of already existing models. In turn, this leads to a mission-oriented perspective in designing security defenses and resilience mechanisms to combat undesirable behaviors. We illustrate this metamodel in an open-source GraphQL implementation, which can interface with a number of modeling languages. We support our proposed metamodel with a detailed demonstration using an oil and gas pipeline model.