The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has the potential to improve the production and business processes by enabling the extraction of valuable information from industrial processes. The mining industry, however, is rather traditional and somewhat slow to change due to infrastructural limitations in communication, data management, storage, and exchange of information. Most research efforts so far on applying IIoT in the mining industry focus on specific concerns such as ventilation monitoring, accident analysis, fleet and personnel management, tailing dam monitoring, and pre-alarm system while an overall IIoT architecture suitable for the general conditions in the mining industry is still missing. This article analyzes the current state of Information Technology in the mining sector and identifies a major challenge of vertical fragmentation due to the technological variety of various systems and devices offered by different vendors, preventing interoperability, data distribution, and the exchange of information securely between devices and systems. Based on guidelines and practices from the major IIoT standards, a high-level IIoT architecture suitable for the mining industry is then synthesized and presented, addressing the identified challenges and enabling smart mines by automation, interoperable systems, data distribution, and real-time visibility of the mining status. Remote controlling, data processing, and interoperability techniques of the architecture evolve all stages of mining from prospecting to reclamation. The adoption of such IIoT architecture in the mining industry offers safer mine site for workers, predictable mining operations, interoperable environment for both traditional and modern systems and devices, automation to reduce human intervention, and enables underground surveillance by converging operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT). Significant open research challenges and directions are also studied and identified in this paper, such as mobility management, scalability, virtualization at the IIoT edge, and digital twins.

In the realm of Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS), Digital Twins (DTs) have revolutionized the management of physical entities. However, existing implementations often face constraints due to hardware-centric approaches and limited flexibility. This article introduces a transformative paradigm that harnesses the potential of distributed Digital Twins as proxies, enabling software-centricity and unlocking composability and flexibility for purpose-oriented digital twin development and deployment. The proposed microservices-based architecture, rooted in service-oriented architecture (SOA) and microservices principles, emphasizes reusability, modularity, and scalability. Leveraging the Lean Digital Twin Methodology and packaged business capabilities expedites digital twin creation and deployment, facilitating dynamic responses to evolving industrial demands. This architecture segments the industrial realm into physical and virtual spaces, where core components are responsible for digital twin management, deployment, and secure interactions. By abstracting and virtualizing physical entities into individual digital twins, this approach establishes the groundwork for purpose-oriented composite digital twin creation. Our key contributions involve a comprehensive exposition of the architecture, a practical proof-of-concept (PoC) implementation, and the application of the architecture in a use-case scenario. Additionally, we provide an analysis, including a quantitative evaluation of the proxy aspect and a qualitative comparison with traditional approaches. This assessment emphasizes key properties such as reusability, modularity, abstraction, discoverability, and security, transcending the limitations of contemporary industrial systems and enabling agile, adaptable digital proxies to meet modern industrial demands.

Authentication, authorization, and digital identity management are core features required by secure digital systems. In this, authorization is a key component for regulating the detailed access credentials with respect to required service resources. Authorization, therefore, plays a significant role in the trust management of autonomous devices and services. Due to the heterogeneous nature of cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things, several authorization techniques using different access control models, accounts, groups, tokens, and delegations have both strengths and weaknesses. Many studies exist in the literature that focus on other main security requirements, such as authentication, identity management, and confidentiality. However, there is a need for a comprehensive review of different authorization techniques in cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things. A specific target of this paper is authorization in the cyber-physical system and Internet of Things networks with non-constrained devices in an industrial context with mobility, subcontractors, and autonomous machines that are able to carry out advanced tasks on behalf of others. We study the different authorization techniques using our three-dimensional classification, including access control models, subgranting models, and authorization governance. We focus on the state of the art of authorization subgranting, including delegation techniques by access control/authorization server and self-contained authorization using a new concept of power of attorney. Comparisons are performed with respect to several parameters, such as type of communication, method of authorization, control of expiration, and use of techniques such as public key certificate, encryption techniques, and tokens. The results show the differences and similarities of server-based and power of attorney-based authorization subgranting. The most common standards are also analyzed in light of those classifications.

The rise of distributed ledger technologies, such as R3 Corda, Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum, has lead to a surge of interest in digitalizing different forms of contractual cooperation. By allowing for ledgers of collaboration-critical data to be reliably maintained between stakeholders without intermediaries, these solutions might enable unprecedented degrees of automation across organizational boundaries, which could have major implications for supply chain integration, medical journal sharing and many other use cases. However, these technologies tend to break with prevailing business practices by relying on code-as-contracts and distributed consensus algorithms, which can impose disruptive requirements on contract language, cooperation governance and interaction privacy. In this paper, we show how our Exchange Network architecture could be applied to avoid these disruptors. To be able to reason about the adequacy of our architecture, we present six requirements for effective contractual collaboration, which notably includes negotiable terms and effective adjudication. After outlining the architecture and our implementation of it, we describe how the latter meets our requirements by facilitating (1) negotiation, (2) user registries, (3) ownership ledgers and (4) definition sharing, as well as by only replicating ledgers between stakeholder pairs. To show how our approach compares to other solutions, we also consider how Corda, Fabric and Ethereum meet our requirements. We conclude that digital negotiation and ownership could replace many proposed uses of code-as-contracts for better compatibility with current contractual practices, as well as noting that distributed consensus algorithms are not mandatory for digital cooperation.

The sharing of data is becoming increasingly important for the process and manufacturing industries that are using data-driven models and advanced analysis to assess production performance and make predictions, e.g., on wear and tear. In such environments, access to data needs to be accurately controlled to prevent leakage to unauthorized users while providing easy to manage policies. Data should further be shared with users outside trusted domains using encryption. Finally, means for revoking access to data are needed. This paper provides a survey on attribute-based approaches for access control to data, focusing on policy management and enforcement. We aim to identify key properties provided by attribute-based access control (ABAC) and attribute-based encryption (ABE) that can be combined and used to meet the abovementioned needs.We describe such possible combinations in the context of a proposed architecture for secure data sharing. The paper concludes by identifying knowledge gaps to provide direction to future research on attribute-based approaches for secure data sharing in industrial contexts.