Managing Assurance Cases in Model Based Software Systems

Software has emerged as a significant part of many domains, including financial service platforms, social networks and vehicle control. Standards organizations have responded to this by creating regulations to address issues such as safety and privacy. In this context, compliance of software with standards has emerged as a key issue. For software development organizations, compliance is a complex and costly goal to achieve and is often accomplished by producing so-called assurance cases, which demonstrate that the system indeed satisfies the property imposed by a standard (e.g., safety, privacy, security). As systems and standards undergo evolution for a variety of reasons, maintaining assurance cases multiplies the effort. In this work, we propose to exploit the connection between the field of model management and the problem of compliance management and propose methods that use model management techniques to address compliance scenarios such as assurance case evolution and reuse. For validation, we ground our approaches on the automotive domain and the ISO 26262 standard for functional safety of road vehicles.