“Manufacturing equipment has always been susceptible to physical degradation, so built-in sensors and data collection is used to understand how the health of machines will evolve over time. However, modern machinery is connected to a network, where emerging cyber threats can confound sensor data and obfuscate the health status of these systems. So, there’s a recognized need for next-generation techniques to enable real-time threat detection of cyber-physical threats using alternative monitoring solutions,” said Jackson Cornelius, CFD Research principal investigator for this effort.
These cyber-physical threats can lead to unintended operation, system failure, significant cost, and injury. Modern systems in the Internet-of-things (IoT) space often employ side-channel monitoring techniques, such as energy consumption auditing, to characterize the health of a system-of-interest, estimate threat risk, and isolate the sources of threats. Therefore, the adoption of these techniques on manufacturing floors with high-valued machinery is critical, especially as machines become networked and cloud-connected.
CFD Research is developing a unified deep learning framework for health and security monitoring that captures all accessible data on target manufacturing systems, correlates this data with a device’s energy profile in real-time, and offers actionable insights into a system’s current health and the system’s prognosis. This will help Air Force and other key stakeholders know when and why anomalous behavior is occurring in their machinery.
“The end-product arising from this effort will be an innovative, commercial-quality software tool that can be inserted into existing manufacturing systems and provide real-time data analytics, threat diagnosis, and system prognosis during operation,” noted Dr. Kapil Pant, CFD Research Executive Vice President. “The proposed technology will be of tremendous commercial value in DoD, DOE, DHS, NASA, and civilian sectors.”
About CFD Research: Since its inception in 1987, CFD Research has worked with government agencies, businesses and academia to provide innovative solutions within the Aerospace & Defense, Biomedical & Life Sciences, and Energy & Materials industries. Over the years CFD Research has earned multiple national awards for successful application and commercialization of innovative technology prototypes, multi-physics simulation software, multi-disciplinary analyses, and expert support services. CFD Research’s impressive three-year growth rate was high enough to recognize the company in the Inc. Magazine’s 5000 for the second year in a row. CFD Research is an ISO9001 and AS9100 registered company and is appraised at CMMI Level II for services.
