Towards enforceable usage policies for industry 4.0

Abstract

Controlling the usage of business-critical data is essential for every company. While the upcoming age of Industry 4.0 propagates a seamless data exchange between all participating devices, facilities and companies along the production chain, the required data control mechanisms are lacking behind. We claim that for an effective protection, both access and usage control enforcement is a must-have for organizing Industry 4.0 collaboration networks. Formalized and machine-readable policies are one fundamental building block to achieve the needed trust level for real data-driven collaborations. We explain the current challenges of specifying access and usage control policies and outline respective approaches relying on Semantic Web of Things practices. We analyze the requirements and implications of existing technologies and discuss their shortcomings. Based on our experiences from the specification of the International Data Spaces Usage Control Language, the necessary next steps towards automatically monitored and enforced policies are outlined and research needs formulated. Copyright © 2019 for this paper by its authors.