Solving Human Error through Procedure Clarity and Simulation

Green hydrogen is seen as a great potential to decarbonize hard-to-electrify industries and support the growth of renewables by solving the problem of seasonal energy storing due to intermittency. However, hydrogen production through water electrolysis is a novel hazardous process with limited testing. Additionally, several hazards come from extreme operating conditions in offshore locations. Consequently, it’s safer to do such operation remotely and with as low as reasonably practical people on board which requires monitoring and control. A great solution to that is to utilize the capabilities of the most recent technologies that accompanied the 4^th industrial revolution such as digital twins (DTs), Internet of things (IoT), and cyber-physical systems (CPSs). Such relatively new concepts raise new safety and security challenges.

The current work is on the aspect of analyzing cyber security and safety challenges that arise from remote offshore green hydrogen production. It analyzes the literature to investigate opportunities and challenges presented by the application of CPSs in hydrogen production facilities. The analysis attempt to answer following questions: (i) What are the technological enablers for offshore water electrolysis process safety? (ii) What are the characteristics of industry 4.0 technologies that are likely to cause safety and security issues? (iii) What are the safety and security issues introduced by industry 4.0? How can these issues be addressed? (iv) What are other technical challenges related to safety and security?

It is observed that technological enablers include:

• Digital twins (DTs): model multiple designs and scenarios, including variables such as weather, to optimize the process, maximize return on investment and minimize risk.
• Internet of things (IoT) and cyber-physical systems (CPSs): monitor process using key performance indicators (KPI) such as energy consumption and production rates which facilitates rabid anomaly detection. It can also help in safety compliance management and prevent violation acts and offer real time alert management systems. Finally, with remote control capabilities, IoT can help in controlling safety levels during normal and emergency conditions

CPSs have characteristics that introduces safety and security challenges. This includes complexity, heterogeneity, interdependency between cyber and physical processes. Other characteristics include fragmentation, autonomous reconfiguration decisions, and other constrains like physical and resource. CPS autonomous reconfiguration decisions and compensatory actions may cause fault masking effects. There are also security-related issues including integrity and availability challenges in the presence of cyber-physical threats with unknown external disturbances. More challenges include resilience assessment, and human factors. This paper provides a comprehensive risk assessment and management that should proactively identify these potential technical problems so that appropriate actions can be taken to reduce or eliminate the probability and/or impact of these problems.