Representative End User Clients
Representative Automation Clients
Representative Software Clients
ARC’s European Industry Forum is part of our successful series of worldwide conferences in Europe, America and Asia. The next European Forum will be held in Sitges (Barcelona), Spain on May 4-6, 2026 and focus on “Achieving Resilient Operations through AI, Digitalization, and Sustainability”. Participants are invited to attend exclusive presentations and workshops on strategies and case studies from the digital front lines.
Impulse session: Resilience by Design - Defense in Depth in OT and Control
Industrial cybersecurity has improved considerably in areas such as segmentation, access control and standards-based protection. However, incidents demonstrate that a system can still receive commands that appear legitimate to the controller, yet have detrimental operational consequences. In other words, the packaging may appear correct, whilst the content is insecure.
The presentation argues that defense in depth in operational technology (OT) should not be limited to the network perimeter. It must extend to the control core itself, through conscious process validation, physical consistency checks and runtime monitoring of control behaviour. The key idea is simple: a resilient system is not just one that is protected, but one that is capable of reacting correctly because that reaction has been built in from the outset.
Using well-known OT incidents will illustrate the gap between communications security and behavioral integrity, and connect it to a practical industrial case: the control of electrolyzers. The talk will also address how the concepts of fault tolerance and runtime verification can be transferred to industrial automation, and why distributed control architectures, such as the IEC 61499 standard, can facilitate the structuring and deployment of these resilience patterns.
The overarching message is that operational technology (OT) resilience must be built into the system itself, not only in procurement, supply chains and plant design, but also in the way control systems detect, absorb and respond to disruptions.
This session is presented by Juan Manuel Escaño, the Director of Innovation and Regional and Social Development and Associate Professor at the University of Seville. He is a senior member IEEE/ISA; ISA/IEC 62443 Cybersecurity Fundamental Specialist; coordinator of the Intelligent Control Group at the Spanish Committee of Automatic Control (CEA) and the Fuzzy Modelling and Control at EUSFLAT.
ARC’s European Industry Forum
Join us at ARC’s European Industry Forum to speed up your digitalization and sustainability initiatives with strategies and use cases which will benefit technology end users and suppliers alike. Discover what your peers and industry leaders are doing today and what steps they are taking to prepare for the future.
For more information about attending, speaking, and sponsoring, please contact Ann-Kathrin Blech (mailto:[email protected]).