  Access control is an issue of paramount importance in cyber-physical systems
(CPS). In this paper, an access control scheme, namely FEAC, is presented for
CPS. FEAC can not only provide the ability to control access to data in normal
situations, but also adaptively assign emergency-role and permissions to
specific subjects and inform subjects without explicit access requests to
handle emergency situations in a proactive manner. In FEAC, emergency-group and
emergency-dependency are introduced. Emergencies are processed in sequence
within the group and in parallel among groups. A priority and dependency model
called PD-AGM is used to select optimal response-action execution path aiming
to eliminate all emergencies that occurred within the system. Fault-tolerant
access control polices are used to address failure in emergency management. A
case study of the hospital medical care application shows the effectiveness of
FEAC.
