Ontology for Rating Dependability Attributes

An important field of application for the Internet of Things (IoT) is the area of monitoring and control, which imposes requirements on dependability. As devices in the IoT become increasingly capable, they can make use of concepts and technologies provided by the area of knowledge engineering to cope with these requirements. Existing work in this area mainly covers dependability threats and means, but dependability attributes are less well investigated.This paper presents a dependability rating ontology that enables the quantification of dependability attributes and, thus, makes them comparable. This is achieved by combining a dependability tree ontology with an ontology covering metrics and scales. IoT devices can use the dependability rating ontology, e.g., to improve their control algorithms, which is demonstrated on the switching optimization problem, a Smart Grid use-case.