Dependability Impact in the Smart Solar Power Systems: An Analysis of Smart Buildings

Abstract

The Internet has been going through significant transformations and changing the world around us. We can also see the Internet to be used in many areas, for innumerable purposes, and, currently, it is even used by objects. This evolution leads to the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. This new concept can be defined as a system composed of storage resources, sensor devices, controllers, applications, and network infrastructure, in order to provide specific services to its users. Since IoT comprises heterogeneous components, the creation of these systems, the communication, and maintenance of their components became a complex task. In this paper, we present a dependability model to evaluate an IoT system. Amid different systems, we chose to assess availability in a smart building. The proposed models allow us to calculate estimations of other measures besides steady-state availability, such as reliability. Thus, it was possible to notice that there was no considerable gain of availability in the system when applying grid-tie solar power or off-grid solar power. The grid-tie solar power system is cheaper than the off-grid solar power system, even though it produces more energy. However, in our research, we were able to observe that the off-grid solar power system recovers the applied financial investment in smaller interval of time.