Digital Shadows for Operational Technology Monitoring - A Comparison of Data-Driven Approaches

Abstract

Critical infrastructures in domains like road traffic management heavily depend on Operational Technology (OT) to ensure safe operation. One faces, however, also tremendous challenges in OT monitoring (OTM), i.e., ensuring the proper functioning of the OT objects themselves, due to their inherent large-scale, heterogeneous, and evolutionary nature. Going beyond the current practice of monitoring single OT object states, the digital twin paradigm could enable a more holistic OTM - research being, however, still in its infancy. Thus, the contribution of this paper is threefold: Firstly, we discuss key challenges from a domain perspective and derive appropriate criteria for a systematic evaluation of data-driven approaches aiming at a digital representation of an OT infrastructure. Secondly, based on these criteria, we identify and discuss promising generic approaches as well as domain-specific ones, ranging from IT networks to Social Networks. Thirdly, based thereupon, we present lessons learned and open issues for further research.