Assurance via workflow+ modelling and conformance
This work addresses safety assurance for engineering systems, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing formalisms like functional block diagrams and GSN.
The paper tackles the problem of system safety assurance by proposing a model management approach called WorkflowPlus (WF+), which specifies three workflows to model safety engineering processes and check their conformance, concluding that existing GSN-based methods fail to deliver on their promises.
We propose considering assurance as a model management enterprise: saying that a system is safe amounts to specifying three workflows modelling how the safety engineering process is defined and executed, and checking their conformance. These workflows are based on precise data modelling as in functional block diagrams, but their distinctive feature is the presence of relationships between the output data of a process and its input data; hence, the name ``WorkflowPlus'', WF+ . A typical WP^+ model comprises three layers: (i) process and control flow, (ii) dataflow (with input-output relationships), and (iii) argument flow or constraint derivation. Precise dataflow modelling signifies a crucial distinction of (WP+)-based and GSN-based assurance, in which the data layer is mainly implicit. We provide a detailed comparative analysis of the two formalisms and conclude that GSN does not fulfil its promises.