Towards Feedback Loops in Model-Driven IoT Applications

The Internet of Things is a thriving paradigm that makes people's lives easier. In the IoT, devices equipped with sensors and actuators communicate through standardized Internet protocols to reach common goals. In Smart Homes, for example, monitoring the current state of an environment, such as the room temperature, could lead to an automated triggering of actions, such as activating the heating system. Small IoT applications, e.g., in Smart Homes, are usually more easy to manage since they do not include a large amount of devices. However, in larger and more complex IoT environments, e.g., Smart Cities and Smart Factories, management and control become a tedious task, especially since IoT devices do not offer the robustness of traditional computer systems. In case of device failures, IoT applications could become unstable or even fail completely. To make matters even worse, faulty sensor measurements could lead to an undesired behavior of IoT applications, even though there are no obvious errors that are detectable by monitoring systems. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a first approach that aims at improving IoT applications' fault tolerance throughout their whole life-cycle by introducing feedback loops ranging from application modeling, to deployment and operation, until their retirement.