Conceptualizing Operational Technology and Service Quality in Critical Infrastructures – The »DevCon« Approach

Critical infrastructures (CIs) such as energy grids, communication networks, and transportation systems constitute the foundational backbone of modern society’s social and economic functions. Ensuring their efficient and safe operation by providing appropriate techniques to monitor the underlying Operational Technology (aka. OT), commonly referred to as Operational Technology Management (OTM), is therefore naturally of paramount importance. One crucial key challenge, however, lies in the continuous evolving nature of CI-related OT at a rapid pace, introducing massive heterogeneities, interdependencies and interoperability problems. Consequently, these complex challenges, make achieving effective OTM and integrative service quality hard to achieve.

The objective of our research project, »DevCon« is therefore to push forward appropriate techniques that facilitate OTM and integrative service quality even amidst of the continuous evolving nature inherent in this kind of systems. In particular, to overcome heterogeneities while explicating interdependencies and ensuring interoperability, we propose conceptualizations of OT objects and service quality, providing the foundations for a pivotal knowledge base. For this, an innovative approach is followed that synergistically combines inductive methods in terms of machine learning and deductive methods in terms of semantic technologies, thereby leveraging their complementary strengths.