Towards Continuous Assurance Case Creation for ADS with the Evidential Tool Bus
This addresses the problem of efficient certification for safety-critical systems like automotive ADS, but it is incremental as it builds on existing ETB framework.
The paper tackles the costly and time-consuming process of creating and maintaining assurance cases for safety-critical systems, especially with changing requirements or degraded components, by leveraging the Evidential Tool Bus (ETB) to automate this from predefined patterns, demonstrating it on an industrial Automated Valet Parking system and showing ETB can create and maintain the necessary evidence.
An assurance case has become an integral component for the certification of safety-critical systems. While manually defining assurance case patterns can be not avoided, system-specific instantiations of assurance case patterns are both costly and time-consuming. It becomes especially complex to maintain an assurance case for a system when the requirements of the System-Under-Assurance change, or an assurance claim becomes invalid due to, e.g., degradation of a systems component, as common when deploying learning-enabled components. In this paper, we report on our preliminary experience leveraging the tool integration framework Evidential Tool Bus (ETB) for the construction and continuous maintenance of an assurance case from a predefined assurance case pattern. Specifically, we demonstrate the assurance process on an industrial Automated Valet Parking system from the automotive domain. We present the formalization of the provided assurance case pattern in the ETB processable logical specification language of workflows. Our findings show that ETB is able to create and maintain evidence required for the construction of an assurance case.