Performability Assessment and Sensitivity Analysis of a Home Automation System

Home automation or domotics is a typical representative of everything as a service (XaaS). Individual houses are equipped with Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and home facilities capable of self-assessment to offer comfortable, secure, and high-quality home services to their residents. However, assessing such systems with a high level of diversity is paramount of importance and challenging to assimilate. Domotics XaaS requires a high quality of service (QoS) in service performance and operational availability. In that regard, we propose, in this paper, a modeling approach based on stochastic Petri nets (SPN) for the performability quantification of domotics architectures. SPN performability models are developed following the architecture of a home automation system consisting of several IoT sensors/devices to evaluate the trade-offs between performance and availability of home automation services. The inter-dependency between performance and availability metrics is evaluated. The metrics include, for example, the mean response time (MRT) and the number of discarded packets. Sensitivity analysis using the design of experiments (DoE) is performed to identify the system's impacting components and performability bottleneck. Simulation results highlight the useful aspects of the proposed performability models for architectural and operational optimization of home automation XaaS infrastructures.