A Trustworthy Communication Hub for Cyber-Physical Systems

The motivation for this research arises from the challenges in the trustworthy communications related operation of cyber-physical systems (CPS), especially in the energy and mobility domains. The increasing amount of distributed energy resources (DERs) of prosumers and electric vehicles requires new ways for CPS communications to enable information exchanges for smart operation in peak consumption hours and balancing power levels in the energy grids in order to lower the energy cost. The huge number of mobile appliances and the related service providers do not serve properly the privacy of the owners, owing to the vertical silo type of operating model in industries. As the results of this research, we provide a trustworthy communication hub for CPS (CPS hub) for solving the challenges related to trustworthy communications between physical resources owned by different stakeholders. The CPS hub realizes the communication spaces concept, and enables combined trust and communications processes when dynamic resources owned by different stakeholders are exchanging information. The evaluations showed that the provided CPS hub enable information exchanges between distributed energy resources of different stakeholders, so that they can join the aggregation process for more flexible and efficient resource usage in energy markets. The CPS hub enable interaction between heterogeneous physical devices of multiple stakeholders to exchange information so that, for example, authorities can see the situation in the emergency area and, simultaneously, the policies of the owners can be taken into concern. Despite limited evaluation scenarios, it is shown that consideration of the ownership issues in the trustworthy communication for information exchanges between heterogeneous physical resources (devices) is possible and feasible. Several future research items, such as, for example, scalability; real-time and streams based operation; as well as consideration of the security, privacy, trust, and safety challenges, were detected. However, the evaluations showed that the constructed CPS hub contribute a set of very essential technical enablers for future smart CPS systems and create strong a basis for such future research towards a future smart society. View Full-Tex