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Are Standards an Ambiguity-Free Reference for Product Validation?

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Reliability, Safety, and Security of Railway Systems. Modelling, Analysis, Verification, and Certification (RSSRail 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10598))

Abstract

The increased use of standards as references for safety-critical applications is drawing the attention of researchers on the fact that the responsibility for the safety of standard-compliant systems may depend not only on developers and assessors, but also on the standards themselves. This paper is focused particularly on some quality aspects of standard clauses, i.e., the natural language statements that are expressed by the standards, and to which a standard-compliant process or product is required to adhere. Various railway standards are considered, and some linguistic issues, potentially leading to ambiguity of clause interpretation, are discovered with the aid of natural language processing (NLP) tools. Real cases of problems in clause interpretation, taken from industrial experience, are reported, to show the possible impact in products and processes that must be validated against such clauses, and to justify the importance of the analysis.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization. https://www.cenelec.eu.

  2. 2.

    Some authors, e.g., Fenton and Neil [17], refer to these statements as requirements. Here, we use the term clause, to distinguish the statements of the standards from those used in requirements specification documents.

  3. 3.

    Proceedings of Planning the Unplanned Experiment: Assessing the Efficacy of Standards for Safety Critical Software (AESSCS), May 2014.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy

    Alessio Ferrari, Mario Fusani & Stefania Gnesi

Authors
  1. Alessio Ferrari
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  2. Mario Fusani
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  3. Stefania Gnesi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mario Fusani .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Università di Firenze, Florence, Italy

    Alessandro Fantechi

  2. ClearSy, Aix-en-Provence, France

    Thierry Lecomte

  3. Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

    Alexander Romanovsky

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Ferrari, A., Fusani, M., Gnesi, S. (2017). Are Standards an Ambiguity-Free Reference for Product Validation?. In: Fantechi, A., Lecomte, T., Romanovsky, A. (eds) Reliability, Safety, and Security of Railway Systems. Modelling, Analysis, Verification, and Certification. RSSRail 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10598. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68499-4_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68499-4_17

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