CausalOps — Towards an industrial lifecycle for causal probabilistic graphical models

Context:

Causal probabilistic graph-based models have gained widespread utility, enabling the modeling of cause-and-effect relationships across diverse domains. With their rising adoption in new areas, such as safety analysis of complex systems, software engineering, and machine learning, the need for an integrated lifecycle framework akin to DevOps and MLOps has emerged. Currently, such a reference for organizations interested in employing causal engineering is missing. This lack of guidance hinders the incorporation and maturation of causal methods in the context of real-life applications.

Objective:

This work contextualizes causal model usage across different stages and stakeholders and outlines a holistic view of creating and maintaining them within the process landscape of an organization.

Methods:

A novel lifecycle framework for causal model development and application called CausalOps is proposed. By defining key entities, dependencies, and intermediate artifacts generated during causal engineering, a consistent vocabulary and workflow model to guide organizations in adopting causal methods are established.

Results:

Based on the early adoption of the discussed methodology to a real-life problem within the automotive domain, an experience report underlining the practicability and challenges of the proposed approach is discussed.

Conclusion:

It is concluded that besides current technical advancements in various aspects of causal engineering, an overarching lifecycle framework that integrates these methods into organizational practices is missing. Although diverse skills from adjacent disciplines are widely available, guidance on how to transfer these assets into causality-driven practices still need to be addressed in the published literature. CausalOps’ aim is to set a baseline for the adoption of causal methods in practical applications within interested organizations and the causality community.