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Informing Assurance Case Review Through a Formal Interpretation of GSN Core Logic

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Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security (SAFECOMP 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9338))

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Abstract

A formalization of a logical subset of Goal Structuring Notation (GSN) arguments is presented. The aim is to reveal the conditions which must be true in order to guarantee that an argument thus formalized is internally consistent. These conditions justify a number of systematic questions which must be answered in the affirmative if a standard safety argument based on natural language is to be believed to be free from inconsistencies. The relevance of these findings to the combination of GSN and controlled natural language with first-order logic semantics is discussed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The notion of refinement used here is based on the notion from the Z [11] and B [1] methods for systematic software development.

  2. 2.

    The context \(\{\varGamma _1, \ldots , \varGamma _n\}\) is formed by combining all the definitions and axioms of the constituent contexts, many of which may be redundant.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This work is part of a larger project carried out for IBM UK and DSTL.

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Correspondence to Victor Bandur .

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Bandur, V., McDermid, J. (2015). Informing Assurance Case Review Through a Formal Interpretation of GSN Core Logic. In: Koornneef, F., van Gulijk, C. (eds) Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security. SAFECOMP 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9338. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24249-1_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24249-1_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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