PAS Releases Automation Integrity Module Enabling Industrial Data Integrity

PAS is an engineering software solution company that is a part of the Hexagon group. PAS develops products such as cyber threat detection, safety improvement, and optimization. 

PAS currently operates in over 70 countries worldwide and serves a wide range of industries, including refining, chemical, paper, mining, and power generation. The work in cybersecurity and data integrity has seen the company recently named the number one global provider of safety lifecycle management as well as the number one alarm management provider. 

 

Automation Integrity by PAS

Automation Integrity is an enterprise platform developed by PAS that collates, organizes, and manages equipment, devices, and systems of an entire industrial process. 

 

The PAS Automation Integrity platform. Imaged used courtesy of PAS

 

In the past, industrial processes were mainly mechanical, and relay-based PLCs would provide basic electrical responses to sensory stimuli. Sensors and computers digitized the industrial landscape, and introducing IoT brought about smart sensor systems. 

However, the vast number of control systems and sensors used in industrial processes can lead to great difficulty tracking configuration data and changes. If devices cannot be configured uniformly with set templates and standards, then different systems using the same equipment can be configured differently. If changes can be made without being authorized or tracked, it can become challenging to understand why problems occur in production lines.

The Automation Integrity software platform helps industrial systems properly track changes made to systems, ensure controllers and devices use common templates, and ensure data integrity. 

 

PAS Releases Sensor Data Integrity Module

Increasing cybersecurity concerns and the extreme use of smart sensors lead to industrial systems with potentially hundreds of thousands of data points. All of these are potential entry points for cyber attacks. 

Building on their Automation Integrity platform, PAS released its Sensor Data Integrity (SDI) module, which helps solve this issue.

 

An example of how the PAS Automation Integrity platform works in a control system. Screenshot used courtesy of PAS

 

The first feature SDI provides is the ability to discover smart, IIoT, and traditional analog sensors. This allows industrial plants to quickly find devices that they are using in their processes and integrate them into the Automation Integrity platform.

The second feature is complete visibility to all devices and sensors on the platform. This allows engineers to quickly navigate different sensors while looking for potential vulnerabilities. SDI also allows for creating sensor type templates so that all the sensors produce data in a similar format and can be configured using standard parameters. 

However, SDI is not only helpful in organizing and collating. It can also automatically detect configuration errors with devices and sensors and identify devices that don’t match their assigned templates. This allows data from devices to have integrity proven, as well as identify devices that may have fallen victim to a cyber attack. 

SDI provides other features to further improve data integrity, including cross-checking parameters and signal tracing to determine data source and destination.

Overall, the SDI module to the PAS Automation Integrity platform can help industrial systems improve organization, create standards across all devices, and improve safety.