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ASSURE 2016 has successfully concluded.

UPDATES

• New! 2016-09-30: ASSURE 2016 concluded successfully. The accepted papers appear in the SAFECOMP 2016 Workshop Proceedings. Thank you for attending! See you in 2017.

• 2016-07-18: Clive Tomsett, Clinical Strategist at the Cerner Corporation, will give an invited keynote talk!
• 2016-07-18: The ASSURE 2016 Program has been announced. The final program is contingent on registration. If you haven’t already done so, please register for ASSURE 2016 via SAFECOMP 2016.
• 2016-06-08: ASSURE 2016 will be held on Tuesday, Sep. 20, 2016. The accepted papers and program will be posted here soon.
• 2016-06-07: Authors of accepted papers have been notified. The final, camera-ready version and a signed copyright release form are due on June 20, 2016. Instructions on submitting both the final version and the copyright form have been posted.
• 2016-05-26: Paper submission deadlines have passed. Submission is now closed.
• 2016-05-16: ASSURE deadlines have been extended by to May 26, 2016. Submit a paper now!
• 2016-03-28: The deadline to submit papers to ASSURE 2016 is May 17, 2016.
• 2016-03-28: The ASSURE 2016 call for papers, and the paper submission guidelines are now available.
• 2016-03-07: The ASSURE 2016 website is live!

Introduction

The 4th International Workshop on Assurance Cases for Software-intensive Systems (ASSURE 2016) is being collocated this year with SAFECOMP 2016, and aims to provide an international forum for high-quality contributions on the application of assurance case principles and techniques to provide assurance that the dependability properties of critical, software-intensive systems have been met.

The main goals of the workshop are to:

• Explore techniques for the creation and assessment of assurance cases for software-intensive systems
• Examine the role of assurance cases in the engineering lifecycle of critical systems
• Identify the dimension of effective practice in the development and evaluation of assurance cases
• Investigate the relationship between dependability techniques and assurance cases
• Identify critical research challenges and define a roadmap for future development

We invite original, high-quality research, practice, tools and position papers that have not been published/submitted elsewhere. See the full Call for Papers, for more details on topics. Also view the submission deadlines, and guidelines.

Program

08:00 – 09:00 Registration

09:00 – 11:00 Session 1. Introduction, Keynote, and Lifecycles

09:00 – 09:10 Welcome and Introduction, ASSURE 2016 Organizers

09:10 – 10:00 Keynote Talk: Rhetoric or Rigor: The Development and Use of Safety Cases in Health IT Clive Tomsett, Cerner Corporation

10:00 – 10:30 The Agile Safety Case, Tor Stålhane and Thor Myklebust

10:30 – 11:00 Towards Faster Maintenance of Safety Cases, Omar Jaradat and Iain Bate

11:00 – 11:30 Morning Coffee/Tea Break

11:30 – 13:00 Session 2. Formal Evidence and Tool Support

11:30 – 12:00 On Using Results of Code­-level Bounded Model Checking in Assurance Cases, Carmen Cârlan, Daniel Ratiu, and Bernhard Schätz

12:00 – 12:30 Configuration­-aware Contracts, Irfan Šljivo, Barbara Gallina, Jan Carlson, and Hans Hansson

12:30 – 13:00 Developing SNS tool for Consensus Building on Environmental Safety using Assurance Cases, Yutaka Matsuno, Yang Ishigaki, Koichi Bando, Hiroyuki Kido, and Kenji Tanaka

13:00 – 14:00 Lunch Break

14:00 – 15:30 Session 3. Applications

14:00 – 14:30 The 6W1H Model as a Basis for Systems Assurance Argument, Shuji Kinoshita and Yoshiki Kinoshita

14:30 – 15:00 The Assurance Timeline: Building Assurance Cases for Synthetic Biology, Myra Cohen, Justin Firestone, and Massimiliano Pierobon

15:00 – 15:30 Towards Safety Case Integration with Hazard Analysis for Medical Devices, Andrzej Wardziński and Aleksander Jarzębowicz

15:30 – 16:00 Afternoon Coffee/Tea Break

16:00 – 17:30 Session 4. Panel and Conclusion

16:00 – 17:15 PANEL: Assurance Challenges for Safety-critical Autonomous Systems
Panelists:
– Håkon Olsen, Principal Consultant at Lloyd’s Register, Norway
– Jérémie Guiochet, Professor at University of Toulouse, France
– Marialena Vagia, Research Scientist at SINTEF, Norway
– Ovidiu Drugan, Senior Researcher at DNV GL, Norway

17:15 – 17:30 Conclusion and Wrap-Up, ASSURE 2016 Organizers

Important Dates

Important Dates

ASSURE 2016 Call for Papers

Software plays a key role in high-risk systems, e.g., safety-, and security-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, FAA’s operational approval guidance for unmanned aircraft systems), automotive (ISO 26262), and healthcare (FDA infusion pumps total product lifecycle guidance). As such, there is a need to develop models, techniques and tools that target the development of assurance arguments for software.

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

• explore techniques for creating/assessing assurance cases for software-intensive systems;
• examine the role of assurance cases in the engineering lifecycle of critical systems;
• identify the dimensions of effective practice in the development and evaluation of assurance cases;
• investigate the relationship between dependability techniques and assurance cases; and,
• identify critical research challenges and define a roadmap for future development.

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

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.
• 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?
• 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 to create and analyze arguments.
• Exploration of relevant techniques for assurance cases for real-time, concurrent, and distributed systems.
• Modeling and Metamodeling: Representation of structured arguments through meta models, such as OMG’s Structured Assurance Case Metamodel (SACM).
• 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.
• Connections between the Goal Structuring Notation for assurance cases, and goal-orientation from the requirements engineering community.

Submit

Submission Instructions for Accepted Papers

If your paper has been accepted for the ASSURE 2016 Program, please follow the instructions below, when preparing your final, camera-ready paper for the proceedings.

1. Deadline

The final paper and the signed copyright form are due on June 20, 2016. This is a firm deadline for the production of the proceedings.

2. Copyright Release

• Authors must fill and sign the Springer “Consent to Publish” copyright release form using the following information:
  • Title of the Book or Conference Name: Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security – SAFECOMP 2016 Workshops – ASSURE, CYBERSUP, DECSoS, SASSUR, and TIPS
  • Volume Editor(s): Amund Skavhaug, Jérémie Guiochet, Erwin Schoitsch, Friedemann Bitsch
• One author may sign on behalf of all authors.
• Springer does not accept digital signatures, unfortunately. Please physically sign the form, scan, and email it in PDF or any acceptable image format, to the SAFECOMP 2016 Publication Chair by the deadline above.
• Alternatively, upload the signed, and completed form via EasyChair using your author account.

3. Corresponding Authors

Please nominate a corresponding author, whose name and email address must be included in the email containing the copyright release form. This author will be responsible for checking the pre-print proof of your paper prepared by Springer.

4. Pre-print Checking

The publisher has recently introduced an extra control loop: once data processing is finished, they will contact all corresponding authors and ask them to check their papers. We expect this to happen shortly before the printing of the proceedings. At that time your quick interaction with Springer-Verlag will be greatly appreciated.

5. Formatting and Page Limits

Please do not change the spacing and dimensions associated with the paper template files. Please ensure that your paper meets the page limits for your paper type.

• Regular research/practice papers: 12 pages including figures, references, and appendices.
• Tools papers: 10 pages, including figures, references, and appendices.
• Position papers: 4 – 6 pages including figures, references, and any appendices.

6. Final Paper Submission

Submit your camera ready paper using your EasyChair author account, for inclusion into the Workshop Proceedings. After you have logged in, follow the “Proceedings” tab in the top panel.

Springer reserves the right to reformat your paper to meet their print and digital publication requirements. Consequently, you will need to submit all the source files associated with your paper. Follow the instructions after the login for uploading two files:

1. either a zipped file containing all your LaTeX sources or a Word file in the RTF format, and
2. a PDF version of your camera-ready paper.

Please strictly follow the LNCS paper formatting guidelines when preparing the final version.

Committees

Workshop Chairs

• Ewen Denney, SGT / NASA Ames, USA
• Ibrahim Habli, University of York, UK
• Ganesh Pai, SGT / NASA Ames, USA

Program Committee (Login)

• Ersin Ancel, NASA Langley Research Center, USA
• Robin Bloomfield, City University, UK
• Reece Clothier, RMIT, Australia
• Martin Feather, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, USA
• Jérémie Guiochet, LAAS-CNRS, France
• Richard Hawkins, University of York, UK
• Tim Kelly, University of York, UK
• Yoshiki Kinoshita, Kanagawa University, Japan
• John Knight, University of Virginia, USA
• Helen Monkhouse, Protean Electric Ltd., UK
• Andrew Rae, Griffith University, Australia
• Roger Rivett, Jaguar Land Rover, UK
• John Rushby, SRI, USA
• Mark-Alexander Sujan, University of Warwick, UK
• Kenji Taguchi, AIST, Japan
• Alan Wassyng, McMaster University, Canada
• Sean White, Health and Social Care Information Centre, UK

Previous ASSURE Workshops

• ASSURE 2015, Delft, The Netherlands
• ASSURE 2014, Naples, Italy
• ASSURE 2013, San Francisco, USA

Contact Us

If you have questions about paper topics, submission and/or about ASSURE 2016 in general, please contact the Workshop Organizers.