A Reliability Ontology for IoT Systems

IoT systems integrate hardware, firmware/software, and communication services that operate under evolving operating conditions such as power constraints, intermittent connectivity, and over-the-air updates. Reliability failures frequently arise from interactions across these domains. Yet, conventional reliability practices often remain siloed and hardware-centric, limiting the ability to model cross-domain failure propagation and system-level outcomes. This paper presents a reliability ontology for IoT systems and the STRAITS workflow for Design for Reliability. The ontology is implemented as an OWL 2 knowledge model, and SHACL shapes encode the method binding rules to enable automated validation of completeness and traceability. A smart-home sensor example demonstrates interaction-centered reliability modeling and provides quantitative completeness metrics that can be tracked across development iterations.