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Assurance via model transformations and their hierarchical refinement

Published: 14 October 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Assurance is a demonstration that a complex system (such as a car or a communication network) possesses an importantproperty, such as safety or security, with a high level of confidence. In contrast to currently dominant approaches to building assurance cases, which are focused on goal structuring and/or logical inference, we propose considering assurance as a model transformation (MT) enterprise: saying that a system possesses an assured property amounts to saying that a particular assurance view of the system comprising the assurance data, satisfies acceptance criteria posed as assurance constraints. While the MT realizing this view is very complex, we show that it can be decomposed into elementary MTs via a hierarchy of refinement steps. The transformations at the bottom level are ordinary MTs that can be executed for data specifying the system, thus providing the assurance data to be checked against the assurance constraints. In this way, assurance amounts to traversing the hierarchy from the top to the bottom and assuring the correctness of each MT in the path. Our approach has a precise mathematical foundation (rooted in process algebra and category theory) --- a necessity if we are to model precisely and then analyze our assurance cases. We discuss the practical applicability of the approach, and argue that it has several advantages over existing approaches.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    MODELS '18: Proceedings of the 21th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems
    October 2018
    478 pages
    ISBN:9781450349499
    DOI:10.1145/3239372
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 14 October 2018

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    Author Tags

    1. Assurance case
    2. Block diagram
    3. Decomposition
    4. Model transformation
    5. Substitution

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    MODELS '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 29 of 101 submissions, 29%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 144 of 506 submissions, 28%

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    • (2023) Lessons Learned Building a Tool for Workflow + 2023 ACM/IEEE 26th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS)10.1109/MODELS58315.2023.00032(140-150)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2023
    • (2023)Assurance Case Development as Data: A Manifesto2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results (ICSE-NIER)10.1109/ICSE-NIER58687.2023.00030(135-139)Online publication date: May-2023
    • (2022)The ForeMoSt approach to building valid model-based safety argumentsSoftware and Systems Modeling10.1007/s10270-022-01063-422:5(1473-1494)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2022
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    • (2021)Generation and Verification of Executable Assurance Case by Model-based Engineering2021 IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering Workshops (ISSREW)10.1109/ISSREW53611.2021.00096(323-326)Online publication date: Oct-2021
    • (2021)Integration of Formal Proof into Unified Assurance Cases with Isabelle/SACMFormal Aspects of Computing10.1007/s00165-021-00537-4Online publication date: 8-Jun-2021
    • (2021)Validating Safety Arguments with LeanSoftware Engineering and Formal Methods10.1007/978-3-030-92124-8_2(23-43)Online publication date: 3-Dec-2021
    • (2019)Software engineering for automated vehiclesProceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings10.1109/ICSE-Companion.2019.00024(6-8)Online publication date: 25-May-2019
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