Are New ICS Maintenance Services Needed?

Traditionally, regular maintenance of industrial control systems has been the responsibility of an internal I&E group, perhaps with assistance from contractors or suppliers. This approach is generally appropriate in cases where systems made up of components from a small number of suppliers. Unfortunately, such configurations are becoming less common. It is far more common for such systems to have evolved over time, and include components of various ages, from a variety of sources. Such complexity represents serious challenges for support.

New Challenges Require New Maintenance Approaches

For many asset owners, their internal support groups struggle to maintain the necessary number of people, with the necessary skills. Adding new responsibilities, such as maintaining the security of these systems and associated network and system components adds to the challenge. Moreover, without opportunities for advancement, support personnel may not be interested in learning these new skills. Clearly, control systems have become far too complex for many of these groups to cope with without assistance. Various suppliers are trying to address some portion of this problem, typically beginning with asset discovery and the creation of an asset database. However, these do not provide the actual support services, but only the data to be used in such support. The ARC Automation Supplier Provided Services study goes into these issues in depth. 

These challenges necessitate a new approach to ICS-specific maintenance, like IT service management but tailored to the industrial environment. New approaches could include a workflow for problem description, and a database of past incidents related to the same device or same product that includes appropriate metrics for performance measurement. A supporting tool could provide maintenance workflow automation that:

• Helps internal support staff become much more productive,
• Allows a multi-tier approach to digital maintenance management, and
• Makes outsourcing more feasible.

Users of such tools would be able to log ICS problems in a database, and to quickly determine if a given problem is known (and solved) already in some other part of the company. Such a database would also provide for valuable data mining opportunities, such as identifying products or product combinations which are more error prone than others.

There are clearly many challenges, including:

• Asset owners must be convinced that a service provider has sufficient experience and "breadth" to be able to understand and support all the technology that they have in place.
• There must be the necessary level of trust to assign such responsibilities.
• Accountability must be shared between the asset owner and the service provider in cases where failure may impact plant availability, reliability, etc.
• Does the above describe an unfilled need? More discussion is no doubt required. The upcoming ARC industry forum provides a venue for this conversation.