22 September 2026, Valencia, Spain
Held in conjunction with SAFECOMP 2026 - 45th International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability and Security
System assurance and certification are amongst the most expensive and time-consuming tasks in the engineering of critical systems, e.g., safety-critical, security-critical, privacy-critical, explainability-critical, sustainability-critical, mission-critical, and business-critical systems. 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. In addition, the challenges arising from system assurance and certification are further growing as a result of the technological advancements of critical systems. For example, embedded systems have significantly increased in number, technical complexity, and sophistication towards open, interconnected, networked, intelligent systems such as self-driving cars. This has brought a cyber-physical and an autonomy 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. Privacy is also a major concern for systems managing personal or sensitive data. The rise of notions such as cyber-physical and autonomous 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 methods 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, security, privacy, explainability, and sustainability engineering, certification processes, model-based engineering, software and hardware design, critical systems, and application communities (transport, healthcare, industrial automation, robotics, nuclear, defence, etc.).
SASSUR 2026 is co-located with the SAFECOMP 2026 conference.
The important dates are:
Paper submission: 4 May 2026 (AoE)
Notification of acceptance: 25 May 2026
Camera-ready submission: 8 June 2026
Workshop: 22 September 2026
The workshop is supported by the REBECCA EU project, the AETERNAL, FDT4S, and "A holistic approach to domain-independent development of digital twins" Spanish projects, and the ∞COMPASS and TSF (Towards a Sustainable Future) Swedish projects in the context of the Software Center.