The Robust Software Engineering group, based in the Intelligent Systems Division at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California, is working to increase the reliability and robustness of NASA's mission related software, and the productivity of its software engineering. The technology developed by this group is applied to NASA projects involved with Space and Aeronautics.
At SiriusCon Online 2018, we have invited Ewen Denney a computer scientist expert in safety assurance and certification methods in the Robust Software Engineering Group, to present AdvoCATE, a toolset developed with Eclipse Sirius to specify Safety/assurance cases.
Safety/assurance cases “provide an audit trail of assurance considerations from concept through operations, demonstrating that the risks associated with a specific system concern (such as safety, security, etc.) have been identified, are well-understood, have been appropriately controlled, and that there are processes in place to monitor the performance and effectiveness of the risk management measures”.
AdvoCATE is an Eclipse-based workbench based on model-driven technologies (EMF) that allows:
- Manual creation and editing of assurance arguments
- User-customizable metadata.
- Structuring of arguments using modules and hierarchy.
- Formal methods integration
- Assembly of manually-created and auto-generated assurance argument fragments.
- Semi-automated creation of arguments through argument pattern instantiation.
- Computation of argument metrics
- Logical querying
- Hazard analysis and risk assessment:
- Capture of risk reduction and assurance requirements
- Safety architecture modeling using modules and hierarchy.
- Traceability and consistency between related artifacts
- Assurance analytics
In AdvoCATE, Sirius is used to implement a suite of graphical editors to visualize and modify Bow Tie diagrams (BTDs) that compose a Safety Architecture. A BTD is a graphical method to link identified hazards to the appropriate mitigation measures.
Abstract BTD example
Concrete BTD example
To learn more about AdvoCATE, don’t miss Ewen Denney’s talk at SiriusCon, the 4th of December, 4:30pm - 5:00pm CET.
You can register for free and attend the event online from you own office.
