Motivation. Increasingly, safety regulatory bodies require the developers of critical software systems to provide explicit safety cases - defined in terms of structured arguments based on objective evidence - in order to prove that the system is acceptable safe [#!Simula10!#]. Argumentative-based safety cases are progressively adopted in the defense (UK), automotive, railways, off-shore oil & gas, or medical device domains. Consequently, this research aims i) to identify links between argumentation theory and engineering of safety systems, ii) to develop argumentation methods to transfer confidence in safety-critical software systems. iii) to apply the developed technical instrumentation at two case studies: 1) safeness of autonomous driving software, respectively 2) justifying correctness of firewall configuration. System capabilities include 1) automatic norm checking for compliance, 2) safety reports generation, 3) facilitating understanding and confidence transfer.
Objectives. The top level scientific objective regards safety assurance of software systems by means of argumentation theory. A second objective would be to increase the cooperation of the research groups from Technical University of Cluj-Napoca with those from Universidad National del Sur. Two strategies are enacted to achieve it: 1) writing papers with authors from both countries and 2) organising a workshop in Romania and one workshop in Argentina. We intend to co-locate the Romanian workshop with the 10th International Conference on Intelligent Computer Communication and Processing organised by the Computer Science Department of TUCN on September 2014. A traditional track of the conference is represented by agreement technologies and argumentative agents, which is in line with the topic of the bilateral project.
