Model-Driven Software Development Approach: Ensuring Safety of an IoT-Based Plant Health Monitoring System

Environmental monitoring is the process of collecting environmental data over time and monitoring for any changes that could be detrimental to the manufacturing or distribution of a product. Accurate monitoring of environmental conditions is crucial across all regulated industries, as overlooking even minor errors can result in significant financial losses and put the safety of humans at risk. Key to this process is enabling monitoring operations to be safe, reliable, and cost effective, i.e., the connected devices must be correctly configured and operate as intended. This paper presents safe monitoring development practice from software engineering perspectives and describes an associated framework, which ensures safety of an IoT-based plant health monitoring system. Furthermore, this study investigates some of the challenges that occur when building the system that operates with environmental sensing and processing devices through IoT, in particular, how such systems remain safe and how they can be built to be re-configurable. The study is based on postgraduate projects carried out at the University of Southern Denmark. The projects set out to exploit the challenges that engineering students faced from early on the design to the actual implementation of a plant monitoring system. This study also addresses how adapting continuous software engineering and technology practices could mitigate such challenges and provide identification of new research directions and continuous development.