D-RisQ (United Kingdom)

Assurance cases are used to communicate and assess confidence in critical system properties such as safety and security. Historically, assurance cases have been manually created documents, which are evaluated by system stakeholders through lengthy and complicated processes. In recent years, model-based system assurance approaches have gained popularity to improve the efficiency and quality of system assurance activities. This becomes increasingly important, as systems becomes more complex, it is a challenge to manage their development life-cycles, including coordination of development, verification and validation activities, and change impact analysis in inter-connected system assurance artifacts. Moreover, there is a need for assurance cases that support evolution during the operational life of the system, to enable continuous assurance in the face of an uncertain environment, as Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) are adopted into society. In this paper, we contribute ACCESS — Assurance Case Centric Engineering of Safety–critical Systems, an engineering methodology, together with its tool support, for the development of safety–critical systems around evolving model-based assurance cases. We show how model-based system assurance cases can trace to heterogeneous engineering artifacts (e.g. system architectural models, system safety analysis, system behaviour models, etc.), and how formal methods can be integrated during the development process. We demonstrate how assurance cases can be automatically evaluated both at development and runtime. We apply our approach to a case study based on an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV).

This paper will outline the approach taken to produce a certified autonomous vehicle under a project funded by the UK Technology Strategy Board. The aim of the project is to show that it is possible to automate the system design validation as well as the verification of the implementation in software. By doing so, we aim to show that there is considerably reduced time and cost while still being able to meet certification requirements. The project will use a maritime example to show that the techniques can be used to meet the highest assurance requirements of any domain, e.g. DAL A for DO178C in aerospace. This approach has been taken firstly because the available budget precludes an air domain demonstration and secondly because the significant aspects of the project should be easily be transferred to other domains.