Using Digital Twin Data for the Attribute-Based Usage Control of Value-Added Networks

The great progress in the field of digitization and networking of the industry brings many advantages as well as new challenges. On the one hand, it enables new business models that hold great economic growth potential. On the other hand, it leads to an increased heterogeneity of the resulting value- added networks. This poses a striking problem when it comes to the interconnection of industrial devices and the establishment of new business models. Since the disadvantages can quickly outweigh the advantages, activities in this area proceed still very cautiously. A solution is offered by highly dynamic attribute-based usage control architectures at network-level, which monitor the entire communication in the value-added networks. Previous approaches, however, either have the disadvantage that they can only use communication metadata as attributes, or are highly specialized and tailored to the respective systems of the individual network nodes. In addition, they are usually pure access control systems instead of usage control systems. In this paper, the authors propose a novel attribute-based usage control model (ABUC) that allows simulation models in form of digital twins of the respective network components to be used in order to predict their behavior and thus control network traffic according to predicted usage. The ABUC model is then implemented in a use case and validated with several performance tests.