Information security risk-based inherently safer design for intelligent oil and gas pipeline systems

Inherent safety is a proactive approach for hazard/risk management during process plant design and operation. The continuous research and initiative projects developments have resulted in new types of systems implementing functionalities unforeseen in the past, thus requiring the development of new methods to ensure their inherent safety. CPSs can be defined as systems which collect the information from the physical environment using sensors and communication channels, analyze it using controllers and affect the physical environment and relevant processes through actuators to achieve specific goal during their operation. Compared with the mechatronic systems, CPSs consist of integrated components/subsystems and can be also interconnected with other CPSs. In oil and gas engineering system, transformative technologies have been used for managing interconnected systems between its physical assets and computational capabilities. The acceleration of the construction of intelligent pipeline systems has triggered an upsurge of research on information security issues of key infrastructures, also poses higher challenges to inherently safer design based on information security risks. Based on bibliometric and knowledge map, the existing “Information Physics” crossed domain security threats are analyzed, and seven new security threat models are systematically summarized for information security risk-based safety design. However, there are few researches at present on how to establish inherent safety principles for a CPS system. The result of the paper is increased awareness of new security-related risks that threaten oil and gas infrastructures and of the growing importance of considering safety-security interdependencies.