Reuse in (re) certification of systems

The reduction of time and cost for the creation of a safety case is an urgent challenge that industries must face in the context of safety-critical product lines. A safety case is a contextualized structured argument constituted of process and product-based sub-arguments to show that a system is acceptably safe and thus assure society at large that deployment of a given system does not pose an unacceptable risk of harm". Safety assurance and assessment processes required by standards and jurisdictions use to span several years and consume a large number of resources. To reduce time and cost, reuse capabilities are being investigated. At the core of this effort, there is the objective to provide a generic metamodel capturing concepts of safety compliance processes. This is opening many doors towards a common model-based certication framework that can simultaneously target diverse domains such as the automotive, railway, avionics, air traffic management, industrial automation, or space domains. Then, different recurrent scenarios of (re)certification are being studied with their own characteristics and challenges. For example, in the system upgrade scenario we aim to identify the parts of the safety assurance project that can be reused for the upgraded system. In the cross-standard reuse scenario, the same system certified against a standard needs to be certfiied with another standard or, in the case of jurisdictions, checking compliance with a country jurisdiction that differs from the current one. In the cross-concern reuse scenario, a system certified against a given standard (e.g., security related) requires to be certified with a standard targeting a different concerns (e.g., safety). The AMASS project (Architecture-driven, Multi-concern and Seamless Assurance and Certification of Cyber-Physical Systems) continues previous efforts to define the Common Assurance and Certification Metamodel (CACM) and a tool-based platform is being developed. Among its functionalities, advanced techniques are provided enabling reuse by combining process lines, product lines and safety case lines.