Secure and resilient data and model sharing in railways
The project aims to develop, integrate and demonstrate an open and secure solution for data and model sharing between stakeholders in railway operation and maintenance.
Objectives
Historically, collecting, storing and analyzing data has been a time-consuming and tedious task, but the digital transformation has completely changed these scenarios. Today, video sharing services share hundreds of thousands of hours of video per minute! Organizations collect and store terabytes of data every day, but most of this data ends up in the organization's data warehouse. A data silo can be described as a collection of data held by one group that is not easily or fully accessible to other groups or organizations. Data silos arise for a variety of reasons, including organizational culture, competition, and security requirements. The cost of data silos is high because it hinders the overall information generation process.
Railways rely on operational support from different organizations, and here data silos can hinder operations, quality of services and the development of insights. Data must be secured due to high safety and security requirements. Data sharing between rail stakeholders will require secure and distributed data sharing technologies, while maintaining the integrity and provenance of the data shared and maintaining control of data access throughout its lifetime. One of the technologies that can be used to fulfill these requirements is distributed ledgers. Over the past decade, a large amount of research from industry and academia has explored various domains and applications of distributed ledgers. Distributed ledgers are currently used in finance, banking, law, supply chain management, etc. where a high degree of data security and maintaining data integrity is important.
Distributed ledgers can enable secure sharing of data between railroad stakeholders to improve the data-driven decision-making process. Better access control methods can enable the inclusion of data analysis organizations to support information generation. Sharing of data, its associated metadata (when, how, where, who), models to process it and such information now will only improve data usability now but will also add value to data over a period of time. The ability of distributed ledgers to provide secure data and model sharing between stakeholders can be a stepping stone towards the development of digital twins in the rail domain.
The project aims to develop, integrate and demonstrate an open and secure solution for data and model sharing between/among stakeholders in railway operation and maintenance. In addition, the project will provide a toolbox for cybersecurity in railways. As a proof-of-concept, the project will demonstrate this cybersecurity toolkit, which will be built on new emerging technologies to strengthen the ability to provide digital pipelines between data providers and data consumers in industrial contexts. For the development of the toolkit, this project will transfer knowledge from AIFR and reinforce learning from related research.
Project status and results
Evaluation of available technologies and best practices for its application with supporting infrastructure has been carried out. Implementation of test systems to develop understanding of requirements for development and design of the overall system is being carried out.
To understand the requirements and future challenges, data collection from various railway stakeholders and through literature reviews has been carried out, and the results have been disseminated as a journal publication. Further work is focused on implementing the toolbox and demonstrator.
Researchers: Amit Patwardhan (PhD student), Ramin Karim (PL), Miguel Castano
Sponsor: Trafikverket/JVTC
Duration: 2019-2023
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