ARCADE: A Framework for Integrated Management of Safety Assurance Information

Assurance Case Development is an emerging approach for demonstrating that a system is safe. An assurance case includes top-level claims for a property of a system (e.g., safety) and a structured argumentation that breaks down claims into supporting evidence. Its production is an effortful activity that relies on project information and its associated traceability. It is challenging for developers to build assurance cases as they have to identify and gather the project information relevant to the argumentation and assess its consistency and completeness. However, regular project information (e.g. requirements, design, rationale) and assurance-related information (e.g. hazard, causes, mitigation strategies) are likely managed separately. In this context, we designed the ARCADE framework to support the integration of assurance information together with regular information inside project management tools, and to perform automated consistency/completeness analysis and generation of assurance cases. Thus, our approach promotes early and continuous review of traceability information needed to produce assurance cases, while automating their construction. In this work, we present the design of the framework and its current implementation.