In the context of Industry 4.0, a growing use is being made of simulation-based decision-support tools commonly named Digital Twins. Digital Twins are replicas of the physical manufacturing assets, providing means for the monitoring and control of individual assets. Although extensive research on Digital Twins and their applications has been carried out, the majority of existing approaches are asset specific. Little consideration is made of human factors and interdependencies between different production assets are commonly ignored. In this paper, we address those limitations and propose innovations for cognitive modeling and co-simulation which may unleash novel uses of Digital Twins in Factories of the Future. We introduce a holistic Digital Twin approach, in which the factory is not represented by a set of separated Digital Twins but by a comprehensive modeling and simulation capacity embracing the full manufacturing process including external network dependencies. Furthermore, we introduce novel approaches for integrating models of human behavior and capacities for security testing with Digital Twins and show how the holistic Digital Twin can enable new services for the optimization and resilience of Factories of the Future. To illustrate this approach, we introduce a specific use-case implemented in field of Aerospace System Manufacturing.

With the latest advances in information and communication technologies, greater amounts of sensitive user and corporate information are shared continuously across the network, making it susceptible to an attack that can compromise data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are important security mechanisms that can perform the timely detection of malicious events through the inspection of network traffic or host-based logs. Many machine learning techniques have proven to be successful at conducting anomaly detection throughout the years, but only a few considered the sequential nature of data. This work proposes a sequential approach and evaluates the performance of a Random Forest (RF), a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), and a Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) on the CIDDS-001 dataset. The resulting performance measures of this particular approach are compared with the ones obtained from a more traditional one, which only considers individual flow information, in order to determine which methodology best suits the concerned scenario. The experimental outcomes suggest that anomaly detection can be better addressed from a sequential perspective. The LSTM is a highly reliable model for acquiring sequential patterns in network traffic data, achieving an accuracy of 99.94% and an f1-score of 91.66%.

The internet of things (IoT) faces tremendous security challenges. Machine learning models can be used to tackle the growing number of cyber-attack variations targeting IoT systems, but the increasing threat posed by adversarial attacks restates the need for reliable defense strategies. This work describes the types of constraints required for a realistic adversarial cyber-attack example and proposes a methodology for a trustworthy adversarial robustness analysis with a realistic adversarial evasion attack vector. The proposed methodology was used to evaluate three supervised algorithms, random forest (RF), extreme gradient boosting (XGB), and light gradient boosting machine (LGBM), and one unsupervised algorithm, isolation forest (IFOR). Constrained adversarial examples were generated with the adaptative perturbation pattern method (A2PM), and evasion attacks were performed against models created with regular and adversarial training. Even though RF was the least affected in binary classification, XGB consistently achieved the highest accuracy in multi-class classification. The obtained results evidence the inherent susceptibility of tree-based algorithms and ensembles to adversarial evasion attacks and demonstrate the benefits of adversarial training and a security-by-design approach for a more robust IoT network intrusion detection and cyber-attack classification.

The increased consumption of a variety of herbs/supplements has been raising serious health concerns. Owing to an inadequate understanding of herb/supplement–drug interactions, the simultaneous consumption of these products may result in deleterious effects and, in extreme cases, even fatal outcomes. This systematic review is aimed at understanding the knowledge and beliefs about the consumption of herbs/supplements and herb/drug–supplement interactions (HDIs). The study follows the PRISMA guidelines. Four online databases (Web of Science; PubMed; Cochrane; and EBSCOhost) were searched, and a total of 44 studies were included, encompassing 16,929 participants. Herb and supplement consumption is explained mostly by the reported benefits across multiple conditions and ease of use. Regarding HDIs, most people take both herbs/supplements and prescription drugs simultaneously. Only a small percentage of participants have knowledge about their interaction effects, and many reported adverse interactions or side effects. Nevertheless, the main reason for stopping the prescribed drug intake is the perceived lack of its effect, and not due to interactions. Therefore, it is important to increase the knowledge about supplement use so that further strategies can be elaborated to better detect or be alert for whenever a potentially dangerous reaction and/or interaction may occur. This paper raises awareness regarding the need for developing a decision support system and ends with some considerations about the development of a technological solution capable of detecting HDIs and, thereby, aiding in the improvement of pharmacy services.

The digital transformation faces tremendous security challenges. In particular, the growing number of cyber-attacks targeting Internet of Things (IoT) systems restates the need for a reliable detection of malicious network activity. This paper presents a comparative analysis of supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning techniques on nine malware captures of the IoT-23 dataset, considering both binary and multi-class classification scenarios. The developed models consisted of Support Vector Machine (SVM), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM), Isolation Forest (iForest), Local Outlier Factor (LOF) and a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) model based on a Double Deep Q-Network (DDQN), adapted to the intrusion detection context. The most reliable performance was achieved by LightGBM. Nonetheless, iForest displayed good anomaly detection results and the DRL model demonstrated the possible benefits of employing this methodology to continuously improve the detection. Overall, the obtained results indicate that the analyzed techniques are well suited for IoT intrusion detection.