SASSUR 2020

IMPORTANT NOTE: Due to the latest information about the diffusion of COVID-19 ("coronavirus"), the SASSUR 2020 workshop is cancelled

We will keep you informed of future SASSUR editions

System assurance and certification are amongst the most expensive and time-consuming tasks in the development of critical systems, e.g. safety-critical, security-critical, mission-critical, and business-critical ones. Assurance can be defined as the set of planned and systematic actions necessary to provide adequate confidence and evidence that a system satisfies given requirements, e.g. for system safety or for compliance with some standards. Certification can be defined as the legal recognition that a system complies with standards and regulations designed to ensure that the system can be depended upon to deliver its intended service.

Assurance and certification of critical systems require the execution of complex and labour-intensive activities, e.g. the management of compliance with hundreds or thousands of criteria defined in standards, the management of a large volume of evidence artefacts throughout a system’s lifecycle to demonstrate compliance, or the provision of convincing and valid justifications that a system is dependable. Therefore, the companies developing critical systems or components, as well as the companies assessing the systems and components, need approaches that facilitate these activities and ideally increase their efficiency. The challenges arising from system assurance and certification are further growing as a result of the evolution of critical systems. For example, embedded systems have significantly increased in number, technical complexity, and sophistication towards open, interconnected, networked systems such as "the connected car". This has brought a “cyber-physical” dimension with it, exacerbating the problem of ensuring safety, as well as other dependability concerns such as security, availability, robustness, and reliability, in the presence of human, environmental, and technological risks. The rise of notions such as cyber-physical systems and their complexity are leading to the need for new approaches for system assurance and certification. In general, practitioners expect improvements in the available method and tool support for assurance and certification.

The SASSUR workshop is intended to explore new ideas on assurance and certification of critical systems. In particular, SASSUR will provide a forum for thematic presentations and in-depth discussions about specification, analysis, reuse, composition, and combination of assurance arguments, of assurance evidence, and of contextual information about critical products, in a way that makes assurance and certification more cost-effective, precise, and scalable.

SASSUR aims at bringing together experts, researchers, and practitioners from diverse communities, such as safety, privacy, and security engineering, certification processes, model-based engineering, software and hardware design, critical system development, and application communities (transport, healthcare, industrial automation, robotics, nuclear, defence, etc.).

SASSUR 2020 will be held in Santander, Spain, co-located with the Ada-Europe 2020 conference.

The important dates are:

• Paper submission: 31 March 2020

• Notification of acceptance: 30 April 2020

• Camera-ready submission: 15 May 2020

• Workshop: 12 June 2020

The workshop will be supported by the AQUAS, iRel4.0, and VALU3S ECSEL projects, the PDP4E H2020 project, and the Treasure Spanish regional project.