Björn Leander, Industrial Doctoral Student

E-mail:
bjorn.leander@mdh.se
Phone:
070 99 025 99
Division:
Division of Computer Science and Software Engineering
Research group:
Real-Time Systems Design
Web:
Personal homepage



Björn Leander has a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Luleå Technical University, 2002. After working in different fields of software development as a consultant for several years, he ended up at ABB IA CT in 2013. There he is working as a Senior R&D Engineer in software development, targeting system 800xA. Concurrent with the research studies he works with programming, testing and security assessments.

This PhD project target the different challenges facing a process industry containing a heterogenous mix of interconnected smart devices, mainly from a security perspective. Future distributed control systems face the challenge of facilitating the interconnected web of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices in a manner that is secured, flexible, affordable, energy efficient, and easy to provision, manage, and scale while delivering robustness and acceptable performance. In a factory, process industry, mine, etc. an increasing amount of the actuators, meters, etc. will be part of the IIoT. There is a great potential in this transformation: Smart devices are expected to perform better over time, provide new services/aspects related to both owner and producer of the device, enable easy integration between devices and information systems on different levels, etc. There are however a number of new challenges that arise with this change from the traditional view of the OT and control networks as in principal "air gapped" to a situation were in principal all devices can be seen as internet facing.  The aim of the project is to examine some of the challenges and see how well the state-of-the-art solutions perform, especially with regards to scaling. This project is carried out in collaboration between ABB IA/CT and MDH.