Towards Developing Formalized Assurance Cases

The ever-increasing complexity of cyber physical systems drives the need for assurance of critical infrastructure and embedded systems. Building assurance cases is a way to increase confidence in systems. In general, the construction of assurance cases is a manual process and the resulting artifacts are not machine analyzable. The High Assurance Systems team at GE Research is developing technology to support generation of formalized assurance cases for systems, which are both human-readable and machine-analyzable. We have developed a Semantic Application Design Language Assurance Toolkit (SADL-AT) including a semantic model to formalize the Goal Structuring Notation for assurance cases. This paper describes the toolkit SADL-AT and demonstrates the capabilities and effectiveness of SADL-AT by building security and safety assurance case fragments for an unmanned aerial vehicle-based example – a delivery drone.