Smart Manufacturing

Challenge

In smart manufacturing, risks and vulnerabilities arise due to internal and external cyber-attacks leading to production disruption and data theft. Most of these risks emerge from the required storage of vendor data were patents and IP rights reside, as well as employee and end-customer personal data such as personal address, identity, personal preferences, and potentially their social and financial status. These data theft risks occur when networking between humans and production systems acquire, process and transmit data originated from different sources and group them with shopfloor industrial data. Risks for data protection in smart factories are entailed by shopfloor assistance devices operated by the employees such as tablets, AR/VR masks, HMI stations and hand-held data terminals, which are today used solely for optimised planning. The increasing acquisition and processing of large data volumes, and the high degree of autonomy and decentralisation for self-organised systems in Industry 4.0, are factors that may become problematic in the context of data protection. If employee or customer data can be traced, protective measures must be taken. Effective data protection mechanisms should be implemented for privacy preservation and GDPR compliance. 

TANGO solutions

During TANGO, trustworthy and accountable data management, storage and sharing mechanisms will be deployed, enabling manufacturers to protect corporate, employee, and customer data running in real-time operating platforms. Particular attention will be paid in safeguarding a manufacturer’s IP preventing IP theft and making the factory resistant, resilient, and future proof to potential operational disruptions due to cyberattacks. Manufacturers operate closely with third parties and contractors, thus TANGO through trustworthy data sharing and strong identity and access control will provide continuous reassurance and accountability of who is accessing what type of data. The TANGO GDPR compliant data handling policies will be based on trustworthy and accountable data sharing mechanisms, that will significantly strengthen the security of the RIAS Data Handling infrastructure, safeguarding the RIAS and IKEA IP and data ecosystems. Moreover, IoT devices deployed across the whole production chain are often the target of cyber-attacks at factories. Device continuous behavioural authentication combined with threat and risk analysis will immediately detect and prevent cyber-attacks at the factory and especially consider the high number of IoT devices. TANGO’s trustworthy and accountable platform will also enable the data exchange and communication among customers and manufacturers and safeguard customers’ privacy.