Resilient plant monitoring systems: Techniques, analysis, design, and performance evaluation

• This work develops a plant monitoring system that is resilient to cyber attacks.
• A five-layer decentralized resilient monitoring system (RMS) is introduced.
• The RMS is applied to a simplified model of a power plant.
• The efficacy of the RMS is evaluated under several attack scenarios.
• The approach can be potentially used for design of RMS for critical infrastructures.

Resilient monitoring systems (RMS) are sensor networks that degrade gracefully under malicious attacks on their sensors, causing them to project misleading information. This paper develops techniques to ensure resiliency, namely: active data quality acquisition, process variable and plant condition assessments, sensor network adaptation, and plant decomposition with knowledge fusion. Based on these techniques, we design a RMS for power plants and investigate its performance under various cyber-physical attacks. In all scenarios considered, the system offers effective protection against misleading information and identifies the plant condition – normal or anomalous – in a reliable and timely manner.