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CALL FOR PAPERS
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ASSURE 2017
The 5th International Workshop on Assurance Cases
for Software-intensive Systems

September 12, 2017
Trento, Italy.
Collocated with SAFECOMP 2017
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http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/events/assure2017
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Software plays a key role in high-risk systems, e.g.,
safety-, security-, and mission-critical systems. Several
certification standards/guidelines now recommend and/or
mandate the development of assurance cases for
software-intensive systems, e.g., defense (UK MoD DS-0056),
aviation (CAP 760 and the FAA's operational approval guidance
for unmanned aircraft systems), automotive (ISO 26262), and
healthcare (FDA total product lifecycle guidance for
infusion pumps). As such, there is a need to develop models,
tools, and techniques that target the development of
assurance arguments for software.

The goals of the 2017 Workshop on Assurance Cases for
Software-intensive Systems (ASSURE 2016) are to:

(a) explore techniques for creating/assessing assurance
cases for software-intensive systems;
(b) examine the role of assurance cases in the engineering
lifecycle of critical systems;
(c) identify the dimensions of effective practice in the
development and evaluation of assurance cases;
(d) investigate the relationship between dependability
techniques and assurance cases; and,
(e) identify critical research directions, define a
roadmap for future development, and formulate
challenge problems.

We solicit high-quality contributions (research, practice,
tools, and position papers) on the application of assurance
case principles and techniques to assure that the
dependability properties of critical software-intensive
systems have been met.

Papers should attempt to address the workshop goals in
general. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Assurance issues in emerging paradigms, e.g., adaptive and
autonomous systems, including self-driving cars, unmanned
aircraft systems, complex health care and decision making
systems, etc.

- Standards: Industry guidelines and standards are
increasingly requiring the development of assurance
cases, e.g., the automotive standard ISO 26262, and the
FDA guidance on the total product lifecycle for infusion
pumps.

- Certification and regulations: The role and usage of
assurance cases in the certification of critical systems,
as well as to show compliance to regulations.

- Empiricism: Empirical assessment of the applicability of
assurance cases in different domains and certification
regimes

- Dependable architectures: How do fault-tolerant
architectures and design measures such as diversity and
partitioning relate to assurance cases?

- Dependability analysis: What are the relationships between
dependability analysis techniques and the assurance case
paradigm?

- Safety and security co-engineering: What are the impacts
of security on safety, particularly safety cases, and how
can safety and security cases (e.g., as proposed in ISO
26262 and J3062 respectively) be reconciled?

- Tools: Using the output from software engineering tools
(testing, formal verification, code generators) as
evidence in assurance cases / using tools for the
modeling, analysis and management of assurance cases.

- Application of formal techniques for the creation,
analysis, reuse, and modularization of arguments.

- Exploration of relevant techniques for assurance cases
for real-time, concurrent, and distributed systems.

- Assurance of software quality attributes, e.g., safety,
security and maintainability, as well as dependability in
general, including tradeoffs, and exploring notions of
the quality of assurance cases themselves.

- Domain-specific assurance issues, in domains such as
aerospace, automotive, healthcare, defense and power.

- Reuse and modularization: Contracts and patterns for
improving the reuse of assurance case structures.

- Relations between different formalisms and paradigms
of assurance and argumentation, such as Goal Structuring
Notation, STAMP, IBIS, and goal-oriented formalisms such
as KAOS.

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SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
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1. All papers must be original work not published, or in
submission, elsewhere.

2. All papers should be submitted only in PDF. Please
verify that papers can be reliably printed and viewed on
screen before submitting.

3. Papers should conform to the LNCS paper formatting
guidelines. See the ASSURE 2016 website (below) for
details.

4. Regular (research, or practice) papers can be up to 12
pages long including figures, references, and any
appendices.

5. Tools papers can be up to 10 pages long including
figures, references and any appendices. Note: Authors of
accepted tools papers will be expected to give a
demonstration of the tool(s) at the workshop, i.e., no
screenshots.

6. Position papers (relating to ongoing work or proposed
aspects of challenge problems) can be between 4 and 6
pages long, including figures, references, and any
appendices.

7. Submit your paper electronically by May 17, 2017 through
the workshop website:
http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/events/assure2017/

Papers will be peer-reviewed by at least three program
committee members. Accepted papers will be published in
the SAFECOMP 2017 Workshop Proceedings, to be published by
Springer, in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS)
Series.

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IMPORTANT DATES
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Workshop papers due : May 17, 2017
Author notification : May 31, 2017
Camera ready papers : June 12, 2017
ASSURE 2016 Workshop : September 12, 2017
SAFECOMP 2017 : September 12 - 15, 2017

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WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS
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- Ewen Denney, SGT / NASA Ames Research Center, USA
- Ibrahim Habli, University of York, UK
- Ganesh Pai, SGT / NASA Ames Research Center, USA
- Kenji Taguchi, AIST, Japan

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PROGRAM COMMITTEE
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See the ASSURE 2017 Website.

http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/events/assure2017/
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