The Indefeasibility Criterion for Assurance Cases

John Rushby

Appears in postproceedings of a Shonan Workshop, pp. 259--279, Springer, July 2020, Yamine Ait Ameur, Dominique Mery, and Shin Nakajima eds.

 *NEW* An overview of my papers on assurance cases

The workshop was held in November 2016, but the paper was substantially updated in 2019, and published in July 2020.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5054-6_12

Here's a video of a pretty good talk on the topic at Fortiss from June 2017, and here are the slides.

Abstract

Ideally, assurance enables us to know that our system is safe, or possesses other attributes we care about. True knowledge requires omniscience, and the best we humans can achieve is justified belief. So what justification should be considered adequate for a belief in safety? We adopt a criterion from epistemology and argue that assurance should be "indefeasible," meaning that we must be so sure that all doubts and objections have been attended to that there is no (or, more realistically, we cannot imagine any) new information that would cause us to change our evaluation.

We explore the application of this criterion to the interpretation and evaluation of assurance cases.

Available at Springer Link (likely paywalled) or here PDF

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{Rushby:Shonan16,
  AUTHOR = {John Rushby},
  TITLE = {The Indefeasibility Criterion for Assurance Cases},
  BOOKTITLE = {Implicit and Explicit Semantics Integration in Proof
  Based Developments of Discrete Systems},
  YEAR = 2020,
  MONTH = jul,
  ADDRESS = {Kanagawa, Japan},
  SERIES = {Communications of {NII Shonan} Meetings},
  PAGES = {259--279},
  PUBLISHER = {Springer},
  NOTE = {Postproceedings of a workshop held in November 2016}
}

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