Smart-troubleshooting connected devices: Concept, challenges and opportunities

Today's digital world and evolving technology has improved the quality of our lives but it has also come with a number of new threats. In the society of smart-cities and Industry 4.0, where many cyber–physical devices connect and exchange data through the Internet of Things, the need for addressing information security and solve system failures becomes inevitable. System failures can occur because of hardware failures, software bugs or interoperability issues. In this paper we introduce the industry-originated concept of “smart-troubleshooting” that is the set of activities and tools needed to gather failure information generated by heterogeneous connected devices, analyze them, and match them with troubleshooting instructions and software fixes. As a consequence of implementing smart-troubleshooting, the system would be able to self-heal and thus become more resilient. This paper aims to survey frameworks, methodologies and tools related to this new concept, and especially the ones needed to model, analyze and recover from failures in a (semi)automatic way. Smart-troubleshooting has a relation with event analysis to perform diagnostics and prognostics on devices manufactured by different suppliers in a distributed system. It also addresses management of appropriate product information specified in possibly unstructured formats to guide the troubleshooting workflow in identifying fault—causes and solutions. Relevant research is briefly surveyed in the paper in order to highlight current state-of-the-art, open issues, challenges to be tackled and future opportunities in this emerging industry paradigm.