Failure Analysis of IoT-based Smart Agriculture System: Towards Sustainable Food Security

Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart agriculture systems are increasingly being used to improve agricultural yield. IoT devices used for agricultural monitoring are often deployed in outdoor environments in remote areas. Due to the exposure to harsh environments and the nature of deployment, sensors and other devices are susceptible to an increased rate of failure, which can take a system to unsafe and dangerous states. Failure of a smart agriculture system can cause significant harm to nature and people and reduce agricultural production. To address the concerns associated with the failure of the system, it is necessary to understand how the failures of the components of a system can contribute to causing the overall system failure. This paper adopts Fault Tree Analysis, a widely used framework for failure behaviour analysis in other safety-critical domains, to demonstrate the qualitative failure analysis of smart irrigation systems based on the components' failure.