Facilitating use of assurance cases in industries by workshops with an agent-based method

Abstract

Assurance cases are documents for arguing that systems satisfy required properties such as safety and security in the given environment based on sufficient evidence. As systems become complex and networked, the importance of assurance cases has become significant. However, we observe that creating assurance cases has some essential difficulties, and unfortunately it seems that assurance cases have not been widely used in industries. For this problem, we have been developing assurance cases creation methods and opening workshops based on the creation methods. This paper presents an assurance cases creation method called “D-Case Steps” which is based on d∗ framework [1], an agent-based assurance case method, and reports the results of workshops. The results indicate that our workshops have been improved and our activities on assurance cases facilitates use of them in Japan. This paper is an extended version of [2]. We add detailed background and related works, workshops results and evaluation, and lessons learned from our a decade experiences.