An overview of my papers on
assurance cases
A valid concern about this process is that human judgement is fallible and prone to confirmation bias. The best defense against this concern is vigorous and skeptical debate and discussion in the manner of a dialectic or Socratic dialog. There is merit in recording aspects of this discussion for the benefit of subsequent developers and assessors. Defeaters are a means for doing this: they express doubts about aspects of the argument and can be developed into subcases that confirm or refute the doubts, and can record them as documentation to assist future consideration.
This report describes how defeaters, and multiple levels of defeaters, should be represented and assessed in Assurance 2.0 and its CLARISSA/ASCE tool support. These mechanisms also support eliminative argumentation, which is a contrary approach to assurance, favored by some, that uses a negative argument to refute all reasons why the top claim could be false.
PDF
and also arXiv 2405.15800.
HTML courtesy of arXiv 2405.15800.
Also see major update to Assessing Confidence in Assurance 2.0
\newcommand{\arxiv}[1]{\href{https://arxiv.org/abs/#1}{\tt arXiv:#1}}
@techreport{Bloomfield-etal:defeaters24,
AUTHOR = {Robin Bloomfield and Kate Netkachova and John Rushby},
TITLE = {Defeaters and Eliminative Argumentation in {Assurance 2.0}},
INSTITUTION = {Computer Science Laboratory, SRI International},
YEAR = 2024,
ADDRESS = {Menlo Park, CA},
MONTH = may,
NUMBER = {SRI-CSL-2024-01},
NOTE = {Also \arxiv{2405.15800}}
}