Product-line assurance cases from contract-based design

Abstract

Assurance cases are used to argue in a structured, and evidence-supported way, that a property such as safety or security is satisfied by a system. In some domains however, instead of single systems, product lines with many system-variants are engineered, to satisfy the needs of different customers. In such context, singlesystem methods for assurance-case creation suffer from scalability issues because the underlying assumption is that the evidence and arguments can be created per system variant. This paper presents a novel method for product-line assurance-case creation where all the arguments and the evidence are created without analyzing each system variant. Consequently, the effort to create an assurance case scales with the complexity of system variants, instead with their number. The method is based on a contract-based design framework for cyber-physical systems, which is extended to define the conditions under which all system variants satisfy a particular property. These conditions are used to define an assurance-case pattern, which can be instantiated for arbitrary product lines. Moreover, the defined pat-PRODUCT-LINE ASSURANCE CASES tern is modular to enable step-wise assurance-case creation. Finally, an exploratory case study is performed on a real product-line from the heavy-vehicle manufacturer Scania to evaluate the applicability of the presented method.

Holistic Perspectives on Safety of Automated Driving Systems - Methods for Provision of Evidence

“…[72,73]. Also highly configurable systems have been considered, where in [74] the use of CBD to assure an entire product-line is explored. A/G-like contracts is notably also the approach of Digital Dependability Identities (DDIs) [27] and ConSerts [25], which we discuss further in Sec.…”

A reference model for software product line capability assessment

“…4 Configurable software products that can be produced by designing the variabilities and variation points of a core software provide reusability, making developers efficiently integrate services related to the needs of their applications. 3,5,6 Although SPL has a significant disruptive impact on the software development industry, the number of organizations that fully utilize this approach is limited. Although most software organizations are aware of the potential benefits of it, many of them do not have a clear path to redesign their existing software development processes in line with the SPL approach.…”

“…Modular product design and exploiting commonality and reuse with approaches like product platforms and product families are utilized to tackle high production and distribution costs arising from high product variety in software organizations 4 . Configurable software products that can be produced by designing the variabilities and variation points of a core software provide reusability, making developers efficiently integrate services related to the needs of their applications 3,5,6 …”