Agent Oriented Assurance Cases
Channel: Ray Feodoroff
Date: 09/12/2018

This webinar presents observations out of forensic analysis of the last twenty years of literature around safety cases and especially goal structured notation (GSN).  

The findings that result come from places where the case notation literature turns on itself or turns on goal oriented requirements engineering notations.

The issues for case notations span comprehensibility, over-argumentation, poor-synchronisation with the system design and just plan disbelief.  

All of the issues appear to relate to semantics that are missing from case notations.

The risk to continuing with case style notations is that, as we move from software, through system to system of systems assurance, the intellectual, temporal, referential and schematic distance  between the design and the argument is also a cause of poor comprehension and belief.

If the arguments for the semantics of case notations are overturned, the fear might be that the vacuum their demise presents cannot be brokered.

Except, there is a way forward without going back to the drawing board.  

If the necessity for use of goal refinement, as a means to present assurance arguments, has been qualified then turning to a goal oriented requirement notation is an avenue.  This would simply require a notation that can boast having a semantic that is  super-set of case notations.

A notation such as that provided in ITU-T Z.151 User Requirements Notation.