A role based access control model for agent based control systems

The spreading of Ethernet TCP/IP protocol suite based communication in automation systems has raised new questions concerning data consistency and security. We introduce temporal-logic RBAC as a method to formalise the security relevant access constraints for an agent based control system. We also offer some examples of such formalised constraints generated from constraints that were originally written down in human language. The authors point out that temporal-logic RBAC might thus be helpful to cope with the new problems of information security in plant automation.