A simulation-driven cyber resilience assessment for water treatment plants

Digitalization is increasingly characterizing modern industrial assets: cyber-physical components allow for greater efficiency, coordination, and quality, but also open to new disruption scenarios with potentially disastrous impacts. In this context, a systematic risk management process should be in place to encompass system’s physical and informative properties. Consequently, cyber resilience is meant to evaluate not only the possibility of failures related to the physical part of industrial items, but also anomalies of - and attacks against - their cyber counterparts. This research investigates cyber resilience of a water treatment system via a simulation model. A digital twin of a water desalination plant has been developed in MATLAB/Simulink along with a custom Simulink block to reproduce cyber attack’s actions. Dedicated resilience metrics are computed to assess system’s cyber resilience. The metrics are defined merging two approaches: (i) a deterministic approach that considers the outputs of the physical process model; (ii) a probabilistic approach that considers fluctuations of cyber-attacks’ duration and impact, and variability of system response and recovery capacities. The results provide evidence on the need for cyber-physical inspired modelling within modern industrial plants to identify criticalities, and design corrective actions.