Managing Assurance Information

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) has been proven to reduce development and maintenance costs, improving the time-to-market, and increasing the quality of product variants developed from a product family via systematic reuse of its core assets. SPLE has been successfully used in the development of safety-critical systems, especially in automotive and aerospace domains. Safety-critical systems have to be developed according to safety standards, which demands safety analysis, Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), and assurance cases safety engineering artefacts. However, performing safety analysis, FTA, and assurance case construction activities from scratch and manually for each product variant is time-consuming and error-prone, whereas variability in safety engineering artefacts can be automatically managed with the support of variant management techniques. As safety is context-dependent, context and design variation directly impact in the safety properties changing hazards, their causes, the risks posed by these hazards to system safety, risk mitigation measures, and FTA results. Therefore, managing variability in safety artefacts from different levels of abstraction increases the complexity of the variability model, even with the support of variant management techniques. To achieve an effective balance between benefits and complexity in adopting an SPLE approach for safety-critical systems it is necessary to distinguish between reusable safety artefacts, whose variability should be managed, and those that should be generated from the reused safety artefacts. On the other hand, both industry and safety standards have recognized the use of model-based techniques to support safety analysis and assurance cases. Compositional safety analysis, design optimization, and model-based assurance cases are examples of techniques that have been used to support the generation of safety artefacts required to achieve safety certification. This thesis aims to propose a model-based approach that integrates modelbased development, compositional safety analysis, and variant management techniques to support the systematic reuse and generation of safety artefacts in safety-critical software product line engineering. The approach contributes to reduce the effort and costs of performing safety analysis and assessment for a particular product variant, since such analysis is performed from the reused safety artefacts. Thus, variant-specific fault trees, Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), and assurance case artefacts required to achieve safety certification can be automatically generated with the support the model-based safety analysis and assurance case construction techniques.

Purpose – Personal projects are any kind of projects whose management is left to an individual untrained in project management and is greatly influenced by this individual’s personal touch. This includes the majority of knowledge workers who daily manage information relating to several personal projects. The authors have conducted an in-depth qualitative investigation on information management of such projects and the tacit knowledge behind its processes that cannot be found in the organisational structures of current personal information management (PIM) tools (file managers, e-mail clients, web browsers). The purpose of this paper is to reveal and understand project information management practices in details and provide guidelines for personal project management tools. Design/methodology/approach – Semi-structured interviews similar to that in several other PIM exploratory studies were carried out focusing on project fragmentation, information overlap and project context recreation. In addition, the authors enhanced interviews with sketching approach not yet used to study PIM. Sketches were used for articulating things that were not easily expressed through words, they represented a time stamp of a project context in the projects’ lifetime, uncovered additional tacit knowledge behind project information management not mentioned during the interviews, and were also used to find what they have in common which might be used in prototype designing. Findings – The paper presents first personal project definition based on the conceptualisations derived from the study. The study revealed that the extensive information fragmentation in the file hierarchy (due to different organisational needs and ease of information access) poses a significant challenge to context recreation besides cross-tool fragmentation so far described in the literature. The study also reveals the division of project information into core and support and emphasises the importance of support information in relation to project goals. Other findings uncover the division of input/output information, project overlaps through information reuse, storytelling and visualising information relations, which could help with user modelling and enhancing project context recreation. Research limitations/implications – On of the limitations is the group of participants that cannot represent the ideally generalised knowledge worker as there are many different kinds of knowledge workers and they all have different information needs besides different management practices. However, participants of variety of different backgrounds were observed and the authors converged observations into points of project information management similarities across the spectrum of different professions. Nevertheless, its observations and conceptualisations should be repeatable. For one, some of the issues that emerged during this work have been to different extents discussed in other studies. Practical implications – The empirical findings are used to create guidelines for designing personal project information management tools: support the selective focus on information with the division into core and supportive information; visualise changes in project information space to support narratives for context recreation; overcome fragmentation in the file system with selective unification; visualising project’s information relationship to better understand the complexity of project information space; and support navigating in project information space on two axes: time and between projects (overlaps through information). Originality/value – The study presents a longitudinal insight into personal project information management. As such it provides a first formal definition of personal project from the information point of view. The method used in the study presented uses a new approach – sketching in which participants externalised and visualised personal information and projects they discussed. The insights derived from the study form design implications for personal project management tools for knowledge workers.

In this paper, the authors present a new method for writing assurance cases. Assurance cases are documented bodies of evidence that provide a convincing and valid argument that a system is adequately dependable for a given application in a given environment. Assurance cases have been used mostly in the safety field, but are now beginning to be widely applied in other areas. Cyber security is one such area, and recently, assuring security of cyber systems has become crucial. Several methods and various guidelines for writing assurance cases have been used. Unfortunately, only experts are currently able to write assurance cases, and it is still difficult for ordinary engineers to write them. This paper presents a new method for writing assurance cases. The main ideas are that (1) documents generated and used during the system lifecycle must be either used by the assurance cases or must be referred to in the assurance cases, and (2) typical patterns exist for assurance cases, and these patterns have not yet been well discussed. This paper presents the preliminary steps in developing a method for writing assurance cases. The authors also report on a preliminary experiment carried out on a web server demo system.

Context: Certification of safety-critical systems (SCS) demands thorough documentation that demonstrates why a system shall be considered safe. Assurance Case Development (ACD) is an approach for discussing, analyzing and assessing the safety properties of systems. Software requirements of a SCS are an essential information included in assurance cases, alongside system design and safety analysis information. Lack of integrated analysis of requirements and safety concerns may lead to safety issues in the development of critical systems. One of the challenges for the agile development of SCS is to address both Requirements Engineering (RE) and ACD in an integrated way throughout the development life cycle. Objective: This research proposes a framework to integrate the Assurance Case Development and Agile RE in the development of SCS. Method: This research is organized in three main phases. First, a systematic mapping study is performed to understand how incremental ACD is addressed by current approaches, and a survey with experts is carried out to understand the development of ACs during Agile RE activities in practice. Second, the framework and its supporting tools and documentation will be designed and developed. Finally, a series of empirical studies will evaluate aspects of the framework in a multi-perspective manner and as long as it is developed. Conclusions: We expect that this approach contributes to leverage the development of ACs earlier and integrated with RE activities in agile development of SCS.

This paper presents a tool for structuring arguments in assurance cases. The tool is designed to support the methodology of Claims-Arguments-Evidence (CAE) Building Blocks that provides a series of archetypal CAE fragments to help structure cases more formally and systematically. It assists with the development and maintenance of structured assurance cases by providing facilities to manage CAE blocks and partially automate the generation of claim structures. In addition to the tool, new visual guidelines called “Helping hand” is provided to assist in applying the building blocks. The tool has been implemented on the Adelard ASCE platform. The target users are assurance case developers and reviewers. The tool and associated methodology can also be useful for people learning how to structure cases in a more rigorous and systematic manner.

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) have significant ethical and safety implications. Questions of informed consent and risk acceptance are of primary importance, as is an explicit identification of the ethical principles underlying these decisions. In this paper we present a process framework for producing an ethics assurance case, which can be used to translate ethical imperatives into design decisions and safety management practices. The process and resultant assurance case integrate ethical considerations into the wider engineering lifecycle, providing a tool to demonstrate that design and safety management decisions reflect an identified ethical position.

This paper explores the benefits of using A3 Architecture Overviews (A3AO) as a tool for project management and interdisciplinary knowledge sharing in a development project. The goal of the development project was to create an autonomous subsea inspection systems for the oil and gas industry. Sharing of implicit system knowledge early in the systems life cycle is a challenge, yet important for successful development of new technology. Through expert interviews and reverse architecting we made A3AO for two new system that were sequential steps into a fully autonomous solution. Through the research we applied these overviews in meetings with HSEQ, finance, senior management, and engineering. The immediate responses were positive, with comments like, “now I understand what we are trying to achieve”, and “Can I please include the A3AO in my document for the management?” Project personnel, with limited system knowledge, quickly got an enhanced understanding of the project goals by viewing the A3AO. We also experienced that senior management used the illustrative tool as a supplement to support a business case for the board of directors. Clients were happy to see models and schematics as a supplement to textural documents when being presented with new technology. Inclusion of industry terminology and support from management would enhance adoption of A3AO within the oil and gas industry. Overall, our research strongly supports the use of A3 Architectural Overviews as a project management tool when developing new complex systems.

Complexity in civil engineering projects has increased over the years, which has led to an increase in the number of organizations involved in those projects. In today's environment, these organizations operate in different parts of the world requiring their personnel to be geographically distributed. However, current project management practices require project personnel to be geographically collocated and, thus, are unable to provide the infrastructure to support geographically distributed project management teams. In addition, current project management practices require access to personal computer (PC) based resources for project information, which is not always a feasible alternative for on-site project personnel, as it requires certain hardware and office configurations. Thus, alternatives to PC-based resources such as personal digital assistants (PDA) or phones are needed for information access. Moreover, once project information has been conveyed to all project personnel, the system should aid them in terms of providing data analysis tools and presenting technical or management solutions to the problems encountered by the project personnel. This paper presents a collaborative project management system with a knowledge repository, analysis resources, and multiple device access to support the infrastructure of distributed project management teams in complex architecture/engineering/construction projects. The primary goal for such a system would be to provide a platform where project information can be effectively shared with any of the project management personnel from anywhere and with a very few limitations on the computing device.

Abstract: Transforming Mobility: Cutting-Edge Innovations in Modern Transportation Systems frames mobility as a cyber-physical-social ecosystem in which vehicles, infrastructure, markets, energy systems, and human behavior co-evolve. The book advances a unifying analytical stack—Car–City–Cloud–Carbon—to jointly optimize safety, reliability, equity, and lifecycle emissions rather than treating them as competing goals. Methodologically, it integrates systems engineering, control theory, network science, institutional economics, and human–computer interaction with an evidence pipeline that links simulation to field experiments and post-market telemetry. Core contributions include: (i) deployable architectures for electrification and grid–transport coordination; (ii) perception-to-planning assurances for connected and automated mobility; (iii) Mobility-as-a-Service backplanes that prevent platform lock-in while guaranteeing accessibility; (iv) curb logistics, dynamic pricing, and freight consolidation that reclaim public space; and (v) governance-by-design—assurance cases, red-team protocols, privacy-preserving telemetry, and equity slices—so innovation earns public legitimacy. Drawing from global case studies across dense megacities, mid-sized metros, and rural corridors, the book translates research into policy-ready playbooks and procurement templates. A 2025–2035 roadmap concludes the volume, aligning interoperable data standards, certified assist-as-needed controllers, inclusive HMI toolkits, and circular design with risk-tiered regulation and open artifacts. The result is a rigorous, actionable foundation for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers committed to safe, sustainable, and inclusive mobility transitions. Keywords: mobility systems, electrification, connected automated vehicles, V2X, MaaS, curb logistics, dynamic pricing, safety assurance, equity and accessibility, privacy-preserving telemetry, digital twins, lifecycle carbon, circular design, transport governance

Modern medical devices are increasingly developed by composing a variety of interoperable elements such as medical devices, services, and platform infrastructures. In many scenarios, multi-vendor consortia are organized to support the development and deployment of interoperable medical systems, in which safety-critical element implementations, risk management results, and safety assurance are reused across organizational boundaries. This reality calls for an assurance case approach that supports interfacing, refinement, and composition of distributed, component-level claims and evidences to construct system-level assurance argumentation. We present a collection of objectives and top-level safety claims towards the development of such an approach for interoperable systems built using medical application platforms.

The NASA Office of Safety and Mission Assurance (OSMA) has pursued the development of an implementable objectives based strategy approach to managing several aspects of the assurance disciplines. Reliability and Maintainability (R&M) engineering and Software Assurance are among the initial disciplines tackled. The objectives based approach involves creating a hierarchy of interwoven objectives and strategies designed to effectively meet the top-level objective of being “as safe as reasonably possible” or to “perform as required over the life cycle.” The logical constructs emerge as tools to enhance management of the assurance functions for flight projects. This paper presents some clear examples of how an objectives based strategy can be effectively employed to promote: •flexible and tailorable standardization for a range of risk levels •rapid self-assessment for Verification & Validation (V&V) •risk acceptance through safety and assurance cases that aggregate the necessary evidence to demonstrate the desired project outcomes. Techniques developed to apply the hierarchy concept to management of assurance are presented, along with examples used to support the new OSMA policy framework. This clearly demonstrates the efficacy of the objectives based approach. This is based on research and practice within the assurance and systems engineering communities, and reflects a high degree of utility for the objectives based strategy among the assurance communities.

Assurance of structural safety should always be a key project goal. However, a number of impediments have arisen that work against the uniform achievement of this objective in current American practices for building design and construction. The characteristics of the several commonly used project delivery systems and the reasons for concern about current practices are described. Changes that are required in the present practices are suggested. These changes include developing better owner perception of the essential need for and value of competent structural design services, and new provisions in building codes that define requirements for project quality assurance of both design and construction. With the recent emergence of more active local, state, and national structural engineer associations, our profession may now be in a position to implement improvement in building codes and in structural design practice that will restore the assurance of structural safety as a key project goal under all project delivery systems.

The paper focuses on enhancing the current or modern software development practices in Information Technology (IT) organizations. The research paper aims to address the gap between various hybrid software development approaches and existing practices that contribute to software development practices. The methodology adopted here is to obtain data from software professionals and understand how the current practices in the software development industry have contributed to the productivity of the employees and the IT organization, which has been done with the help of a survey questionnaire and by analyzing existing research articles and papers on the software development practices. This research is a conceptual model focused on a modern hybrid approach for software development, rather than focusing on a single software development approach, which can help IT organization increase productivity and deliver business value beyond customer expectations. The cost to build and time to market a software product or a software service can reduce by integrating the required software development practices. Today, staying relevant in the competitive market can be made easier by choosing the best available software development practices, frameworks, and models to fit an organization’s value and knowledge system. The conceptual model aims to reduce the gap between various hybrid software development approaches and existing practices contributing to software development. The paper concludes by discussing the benefits of the hybrid software development approach and urge IT organizations to adopt it as per their software development requirements and customer requirements.

With the advancements in utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) in embedded safety-critical systems based on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), assuring that these systems meet their safety requirements is of paramount importance for their revenue service. Based on this context, this paper has two main objectives. The first of them is to present the Safety ArtISt method, developed by the authors to guide the lifecycle of AI-based safety-critical systems, and emphasize its FPGA-oriented tasks and recommended practice towards safety assurance. The second one is to illustrate the application of Safety ArtISt with an FPGA-based braking control system for autonomous vehicles relying on explainable AI generated with High-Level Synthesis. The results indicate that Safety ArtISt played four main roles in the safety lifecycle of AI-based systems for FPGAs. Firstly, it provided guidance in identifying the safety-critical role of activities such as sensitivity analyses for numeric representation and FPGA dimensioning to achieve safety. Furthermore, it allowed building qualitative and quantitative safety arguments from analyses and physical experimentation with actual FPGAs. It also allowed the early detection of safety issues—thus reducing project costs—and, ultimately, it uncovered relevant challenges not discussed in detail when designing safety-critical, explainable AI for FPGAs.

Relationship Management and the Management of Projects is a guide to successfully building and managing relationships as a project manager and in the project business. Relationship management is a core skill for any project business to develop capabilities and manage the interface with projects, providing guidance to project managers as they negotiate with business partners and coordinate between business functions. Whatever the structures and procedures an organization has and whatever the project management tools and techniques, they are only as good as the hands they are in. Yet relationship management, though a well-established discipline, is rarely applied to the process-driven world of project management. This book is a much-needed guide to the process of enhancing these skills to boost firm performance, team performance and develop collaborative practices. Hedley Smyth guides you through the processes of relationship management examining the theory and practice. This book highlights the range of options available to further develop current practices to ensure a successful relationship management in all stages of a project’s lifecycle. Relationship Management and the Management of Projects is valuable reading for all students and specialists in project management, as well as project managers in business, management, the built environment, or indeed any industry.