2014/09/16 by Andrew Gacek, Gacek, Andrew, John Backes +7 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Engineering · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Formal Methods in Verification #Safety Systems Engineering in Autonomy #Software Engineering (cs.SE) #Software Reliability and Analysis Research #cs.SE
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1409.4629
9 pages, accepted to HILT 2014
arxiv created 2014/09/16 · openalex publication_date 2014/09/16 · arxiv updated 2014/09/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Arguments about the safety, security, and correctness of a complex system are often made in the form of an assurance case. An assurance case is a structured argument, often represented with a graphical interface, that presents and supports claims about a system's behavior. The argument may combine different kinds of evidence to justify its top level claim. While assurance cases deliver some level of guarantee of a system's correctness, they lack the rigor that proofs from formal methods typically provide. Furthermore, changes in the structure of a model during development may result in inconsistencies between a design and its assurance case. Our solution is a framework for automatically generating assurance cases based on 1) a system model specified in an architectural design language, 2) a set of logical rules expressed in a domain specific language that we have developed, and 3) the results of other formal analyses that have been run on the model. We argue that the rigor of these automatically generated assurance cases exceeds those of traditional assurance case arguments because of their more formal logical foundation and direct connection to the architectural model.