Toward an Automated Compliance Framework

The Arrowhead Tools project is built on collaboration, both between industrial and research partners as well as between researchers from universities and organizations throughout Europe working together. Professor Markus Tauber of the University for Applied Sciences in Burgenland, Austria is, together with Ani Bicaku, a PhD student at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden, developing and trialing an automated standard compliance framework.

As digitalization continues to increase, the number of standards that need to be followed in order to remain part of important global networks increases. Standard compliance, which began with regional, national and later global standards for weights and measures, plays an important role in simplifying everyday life and enabling wide-scale cooperation and collaboration. Standard compliance guarantees that wi-fi can be used to access the Internet irrespective of where we are, it ensures that products designed in one country can be reliably produced in another and used in yet another. Standardization plays a vital role in creating global markets and providing users with safe, secure services as well as with interconnection and interoperability. Security is, however, an important concern, as more and more operations become part of networks, they become more susceptible to attacks or unauthorized access to sensitive information. This means that a balance needs to be struck between the connectivity necessary for smooth, automatic operations that guarantee speed and accessibility and limiting unauthorized access.

As Tauber and Bicaku explain, remaining up-to-date and being able to comply with existing security, safety and organizational standards remains one of the greatest obstacles to large scale adoption of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in production environments. A potential solution is an automated compliance framework such as Tauber and Bicaku’s Monitoring and Standard Compliance Verification framework (MSCV). The MSCV is based on collating measurable indicator points derived from a representative set of safety, security and organizational standards documented in a metric model. The result is a framework that is able to evaluate the standard compliance of a system or component. In a recent article the MSCV was tested on various scenarios in an industrial IoT use case and the MSCV has successfully provided a continuous standard compliance as part of the secure onboarding procedure for the Eclipse Arrowhead framework. 

Professor Tauber and Ani Bicaku are also grateful for the contribution of Arrowhead Tools Project Coordinator Professor Jerker Delsing of Luleå University of Technology, who is also Ani Bicaku’s PhD supervisor.

You can read more about the work of Professor Tauber here

You can read more about the work of Ani Bicaku here