Course overview
This course intends to deliver information about the application and usage of SE approaches in industrial automation systems (IAS). This includes the traditional Software development lifecycle activities w.r.t industrial automation systems including advanced topics like requirements quality for IAS, Requirements patterns for IAS, design practices for IAS, and testing and commissioning of IAS. In addition, this course includes industrial automation standards, risk management approaches for industrial automation, functional safety and cyber security of IAS. Moreover, this course also introduced SCADA systems and cyber security issues and mechanisms for SCADA systems.
This motives of this course are:
- To develop understanding on the concepts of industrial automation and control systems.
- To be able to use software engineering lifecycle steps for industrial automation and control systems.
- To learn risk assessment techniques for Industrial automation systems.
- To learn about the cyber security of SCADA systems.
- To learn about the standard of cyber security and functional safety in industrial automation.
Participants in piloting
This course was conducted with the Graduate students from the Faculty of Computer Science. Approximately 60 students were enrolled in three sessions. Most of them were 3rd semester (2nd year) students of Master of science in Software engineering program. This course is offered as an elective subject to the master students. The course took place in Fall semester of the 2018 to 2020 academic year.
Timeframe
Fall 2018
Fall 2019
Fall 2020
Use of ALIEN services and tools
Students were assigned a couple of assignments, which were conducted through active learning, and more specifically project-based learning, with the intention of covering the following topics: safety risk analysis, security risk analysis, PLC coding techniques.
The course took place in the Problem-based learning Lab i.e. a learning space designed through the ALIEN project for conducting active learning classes in the Software Engineering Department, Faculty of Computer Science NUCES and in the lecture hall environment. PBL Lab consists of five islands with 8 PCs in all. The lab can accommodate of 40 students at a given time so that 5 people could share one PC. Each island is equipped with movable workstations and monitors.
To achieve this objective following tasks were given to the students:
- Perform FTA, STPA, and FMEA for both of the given SCADA cases (Case 1-Dam, Case 2- Manufacturing system). Each group (3 students) will perform all these analysis for one case only.
- Use relevant safety standards to check the safety requirements of such systems.
- And then propose the possible mitigation mechanisms as per safety standards applicable in the given cases.
- Submit the plc code of the given systems.
