Representation of safety standards with semantic technologies used in industrial environments

Proceedings of: 36th International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security, (SAFECOMP 2017). Trento, Italy, September 13-15, 2017Understanding and following safety standards with their text can be difficult. Ambiguity and inconsistency, among other issues, can easily arise. As a solution, several authors argue for the explicit representation of the standards with models, which can be created with semantic technologies such as ontologies. However, this possibility has received little attention. The few authors that have addressed it have also only dealt with a subset of safety standard aspects and have used technologies not usually applied for critical systems engineering. As a first step towards addressing these issues, this position paper presents our initial work on the representation of safety standards with Knowledge Manager, a tool used in industrial environments that exploits semantic technologies to manage domain information. The proposal also builds on prior work on the specification of safety compliance needs with a holistic generic metamodel. We describe how to use Knowledge Manager to specify the concepts and relationships of the metamodel for a given safety standard, and discuss the application and benefits of the corresponding representation.The research leading to this paper has received funding from the AMASS project (H2020-ECSEL no. 692474; Spain’s MINECO ref. PCIN-2015-262)

An experimental evaluation of the understanding of safety compliance needs with models

Proceedings of: 36th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2017, Valencia, Spain, November 6–9, 2017Context: Most safety-critical systems have to fulfil compliance needs specified in safety standards. These needs can be difficult to understand from the text of the standards, and the use of conceptual models has been proposed as a solution. Goal: We aim to evaluate the understanding of safety compliance needs with models. Method: We have conducted an experiment to study the effectiveness, efficiency, and perceived benefits in understanding these needs, with text of safety standards and with UML object diagrams. Results: Sixteen Bachelor students participated in the experiment. Their average effectiveness in understanding compliance needs and their average efficiency were higher with models (17% and 15%, respectively). However, the difference is not statistically significant. The students found benefits in using models, but on average they are undecided about their ease of understanding. Conclusions: Although the results are not conclusive enough, they suggest that the use of models could improve the understanding of safety compliance needs.The research leading to this paper has received funding from the AMASS project (H2020-ECSEL grant agreement no 692474; Spain’s MINECO ref. PCIN-2015-262) and the AMoDDI project (Ref. 11130583). We also thank the subjects that participated in the experiment

Assessment of the Quality of Safety Cases: A Research Preview

Proceedings of the 25th International Working Conference, REFSQ 2019, Essen, Germany, March 18–21, 2019.[Context and motivation] Safety-critical systems in application domains such as aerospace, automotive, healthcare, and railway are subject to assurance processes to provide confidence that the systems do not pose undue risks to people, property, or the environment. The development of safety cases is usually part of these processes to justify that a system satisfies its safety requirements and thus is dependable. [Question/problem] Although safety cases have been used in industry for over two decades, their management still requires improvement. Important weaknesses have been identified and means to assess the quality of safety cases are limited. [Principal ideas/results] This paper presents a research preview on the assessment of the quality of safety cases. We explain how the area should develop and present our preliminary work towards enabling the assessment with Verification Studio, an industrial tool for system artefact quality analysis. [Contribution] The insights provided allow researchers and practitioners to gain an understanding of why safety case quality requires further investigation, what aspects must be considered, and how quality assessment could be performed in practice.The research leading to this paper has received funding from the AMASS project (H2020-ECSEL ID 692474; Spain’s MINECO ref. PCIN-2015-262). We also thank REFSQ reviewers for their valuable comments to improve the paper

Goals, Workflow, and Value: Case Study Experiences with Three Modeling Frameworks

Part 1: Regular PapersInternational audienceIt is beneficial to understand the benefits and drawbacks of enterprise modeling approaches in certain contexts. We report experiences applying different combinations of three modeling approaches to industrial cases. Specifically, we report on experiences from four companies using a combination of goal modeling, e3 value modeling, and workflow modeling. Our findings help to guide enterprise modeling approach selection in similar contexts, and can be used to make recommendations to improve future applications of the selected modeling approaches

Belief functions for safety arguments confidence estimation : A comparative study

International audienceStructured safety arguments are widely applied in critical systems to demonstrate their safety and other attributes. Graphical formalisms such as Goal Structuring Notation (GSN) are used to represent these argument structures. However, they do not take into account the uncertainty that may exist in parts of these arguments. To address this issue, several frameworks for confidence assessment have been proposed. In this paper, a comparative study is carried out on three approaches based on Dempster-Shafer theory. We extract and compare the implicit logic at work in these works, and show that, to some extent, these current approaches fail to provide a consistent relationship between the informal statement of arguments, their logical model and the use of belief functions. We also propose recommendations to improve this consistency.Les argumentaires de sécurité sont largement appliqués dans les systèmes critiques pour démontrer leur sûreté et d'autres attributs. Des formalismes graphiques tels que le GSN (Goal Structuring Notation) sont utilisés pour représenter ces argumentaires. Cependant, ces derniers ne tiennent pas compte de l'incertitude qui peut exister dans certaines parties de ces argumentaires. Pour résoudre ce problème, plusieurs méthodes d'évaluation de la confiance ont été proposés. Dans le présent document, une étude comparative est menée sur trois approches basées sur la théorie de Dempster-Shafer. Nous extrayons et comparons la logique implicite utilisée dans ces travaux, et nous montrons que, dans une certaine mesure, ces approches actuelles ne parviennent pas à établir une relation cohérente entre les expressions informelles des arguments (objectifs), leur modèle logique et l'utilisation des fonctions de croyance. Nous proposons également des recommandations pour améliorer cette cohérence

An Evaluation Framework for Design-Time Context-Adaptation of Process Modelling Languages

Part 1: Regular PapersInternational audienceTo enhance the performance and efficiency of business processes, it is essential to take the dynamics of their execution context into account during process modelling. This paper first proposes an evaluation framework that identifies the main requirements for supporting the modelling of context-adaptive processes. Using this framework, we analyse four popular business process modelling languages: Coloured Petri Nets (CPN), Business Process Modelling and Notation 2.0 (BPMN), Yet Another Workflow Language (YAWL), and Unified Modelling Language Activity Diagrams (UML AD). The analysis is carried out by evaluating how the respective language notations fulfil the identified requirements in several real-life scenarios. Lastly, a comparative analysis of the languages focussed on their support for modelling context-adaptive business processes is provided