US 10,484,388 B2 · Span of responsibility access control system

Abstract

A span of responsibility access control system for use in plant process management and similar applications. The system leverages span-of-responsibility enabled user accounts and corresponding resource properties to assign, verify, and control access to assets and other resources in the plant process management system on a per user basis. Aspects of the system include configuration of properties for each monitored or controlled asset and association of a span of responsibility based on asset properties, such as asset type and location, with a user account. An access control module compares asset properties to the span of responsibility associated with the user account to determine whether the user is entitled to access any given asset, independent of determining permissions to act on such asset.

Claims13

Dependent claims

A system for controlling views of resources of a plant control environment, the system comprising:

user accounts for users of the plant control environment, each user account having associated credentials, permissions, and user-selected spans of responsibility corresponding to a user;
a plant hierarchy comprising an organized arrangement of location resources and asset resources, each asset resource linked to at least one location resource;
a user authentication module determining an identity of a user based on the credentials supplied by the user and controlling the identified user's ability to perform actions against the resources of the plant control environment based on the identified user's permissions;
and
an access control module controlling the identified user's views of the resources of the plant control environment based on the identified user's selected span of responsibility, wherein each span of responsibility comprises at least one of a location component, an asset component, and an add-on component.

2 more elements

A method of limiting views of resources of a plant control environment in a process plant management system, the method comprising the acts of:

identifying a user of the process plant management system;
retrieving permissions associated with the identified user;
determining the identified user's ability to perform actions against resources of the plant control environment based on the identified user's permissions;
retrieving a user-selected span of responsibility associated with the identified user;
determining resources managed by the process plant management system that fall within the span of responsibility of the identified user based on properties of the resources;
and
presenting the resources within the span of responsibility of the identified user via an output device, wherein each span of responsibility comprises at least one of a location component, an asset component, and an add-on component.

4 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Span of responsibility access control system

Life of this patent

Span of responsibility access control system

Life of this patent

Abstract

Claims13