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Treasure has successfully finished!
Treasure has successfully finished!
Mar 20, 2023
As of March 20th, 2023, the Treasure project has officially finished. It's been three years of intense work to increase the cost-effectiveness of automated traceability for assurance of safety-critical systems by exploiting a model-driven engineering and ontologies. The project has been able to provide novel means for such an end that are linked to current practices and further enable important progress in the state of the art.
Collaboration with and support from different researchers (at institutions other than UCLM) and companies has also been a distinguishing characteristic of Treasure, such as Betraiz Marin from the Technical University of Valencia and The Reuse Company, respectively. In total, and at this moment, Treasure has resulted in five journal publications and eight conference/workshop ones.
It is also noteworthy that the work in Treasure will continue in the just-started REBECCA European project (Reconfigurable Heterogeneous Highly Parallel Processing Platform for safe and secure AI), which will tackle assurance and compliance of Edge AI, including traceability management aspects. There are still traceability needs and challenges ahead and we aim to continue tackling them!
Publication on adherence to software engineering practices
Publication on adherence to software engineering practices
Feb 7, 2023
Many software companies are adapting their traditional development processes to incorporate agile practices, including for safety-critical systems and for traceability management. In this context, it is necessary to count on expert knowledge to evaluate different agile practices and configure them according to project needs. However, this expert knowledge is scarce, difficult to validate, and time-consuming to be considered, since it is applied manually.
As a solution, we have defined a model-driven approach that automatically generates guidelines for the adoption of agile practices through the combination of different development methods. The approach is supported by a metamodel architecture to implement a knowledge repository that characterizes method configuration decisions, which can be reused in different development projects.
The approach is a part of Treasure's model-based solutions for traceability management and is presented in a recent journal publication:
Mastering Agile Practice Adoption through a Model-Driven Approach for the Combination of Development Methods. Business & Information Systems Engineering
Visit the Publications section for more details about this paper!
Best industry paper award at PRDC 2022
Best industry paper award at PRDC 2022
Dec 5, 2022
A paper on the results of Treasure has received a Best Industry Paper Award!
An Industrial Approach for Model-Based Reliability-Oriented System Design. 27th IEEE Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing (PRDC 2022)
The paper is the result of a joint effort between researchers from Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha and practitioners from Tree Technology and The REUSE Company. It presents an approach that deals with system modelling, ontology development, structured textual requirements specification, traceability management, and model quality analysis, all of them targeted at reliability of systems and components. The paper extends the work presented at QRS 2021.
Visit the Publications section for more details about the paper!
Publication on the characterization of V&V methods
Publication on the characterization of V&V methods
Oct 31, 2022
Verification and Validation (V&V) of critical systems, including traceability management, is becoming more costly and time-consuming because of the increasing size and complexity of these systems. Moreover, V&V of these systems can be hindered if the methods and processes are not properly described, analysed, and selected. It is essential that practitioners use suitable V&V methods and enact adequate V&V processes to confirm that these systems work as intended and in a cost-effective manner.
As a solution, we've contributed to the definition of a multi-domain and multi-dimensional framework to characterize and classify V&V methods and tools in a structured way, considering different relevant aspects of V&V. This framework, of which Treasure's one for traceability management is a part, is presented in a recent publication:
Multidimensional Framework for Characterizing Verification and Validation of Automated Systems. 18th European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC 2022)
Visit the Publications section for more details about this paper!
SASSUR workshop held
SASSUR workshop held
September 13, 2022
The SASSUR 2022 workshop was held on September 6th as an online workshop of the SafeComp 2022 conference. SASSUR is intended to explore new ideas on assurance and certification of critical systems, including traceability management, and is one of the events that contribute to the dissemination of Treasure.
Around 20 people attended the workshop. Its program featured a set of great and interesting presentations and discussions on:
Dynamic Assurance Cases: A Pathway to Trusted Autonomy (keynote by Ewen Denney)
DevOps and Safety? SafeOps! Towards Ensuring Safety in Feature-Driven Development with Frequent Releases
Dynamic Checks of Evidence Models for Assurance Projects in Eclipse OpenCert
An Approach for Deriving Reduced Collision Scenarios for Highly Automated Driving Systems
State of the Art Study of the Safety Argumentation Frameworks for Automated Driving System
The proceedings of SASSUR 2022 have been published by Springer.
We expect that a new edition of the workshop is held in 2023.
Publication on the analysis of gaps and limitations of V&V methods
Publication on the analysis of gaps and limitations of V&V methods
Jun 21, 2022
As society increasingly relies on safety- and security- critical systems, the need for confirming their dependability becomes essential. Adequate V&V (verification and validation) methods must be employed, e.g., for system traceability. When selecting and using the methods, it is important to analyse their possible gaps and limitations, such as scalability issues. However, common, explicitly defined criteria are seldom used for such analyses. This results in analyses that consider different aspects and to a different extent, hindering their comparison and thus the comparison of the V&V methods.
As a solution, we've contributed to the selection and definition of a set of criteria for the analysis of gaps and limitations of V&V methods for safety- and security-critical systems. The classification, which is a part of Treasure's framework for traceability management, is presented in a recent publication:
Criteria for the Analysis of Gaps and Limitations of V&V Methods for Safety- and Security-Critical Systems. 17th International Workshop on Dependable Smart Embedded Cyber-Physical Systems and Systems-of-Systems (DECSoS 2022)
Visit the Publications section for more details about this paper!
Safety standards
Safety standards
May 3, 2022
Safety standards correspond to industry-agreed best practices to guarantee that a system does not pose unreasonable risk, e.g. to guarantee that a system failure could not cause severe injury or death. As safety cannot be shown, the standards implicitly define how sufficient confidence in acceptable system safety can be developed. This includes practices for technical risk reduction, trust in the work conducted, and compliance management. Safety and compliance are usually assessed by third parties. Such an assessment can lead to safety certification, as a formal recognition of a system’s acceptable safety for a given application and in a given context. For software systems, the standards deal with the necessary practices to suitably manage the safety requirements allocated to software. Examples of safety standards include the generic IEC 61508 standard, DO-178C for avionics, ISO 26262 for automotive, and EN 50128 for railway.
Traceability management is among the systems engineering areas that safety standards cover. Therefore, their guidance and requirements on this activity are carefully taken into account in Treasure. These aspects deal with:
System artefacts to trace, e.g., low-level requirements and high-level requirements;
Relationship types, e.g., low-level requirements 'comply with' high-level requirements;
The extent to which the guidance and requirements are applicable depending on how critical a function is, e.g., the above relationship must be managed for Software Levels A, B & C of DO-178C, and;
The specific documents and artefacts in which the traceability information must be provided, e.g., Trace Data for DO-178C.
The SASSUR workshop
The SASSUR workshop
March 21, 2022
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, privacy-critical, mission-critical, and business-critical ones. The companies developing critical systems or components, as well as the companies assessing the systems and components, need approaches that facilitate the underlying activities and ideally increase their efficiency. 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 systems such as "the connected car".
Within this context, the SASSUR 2022 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 systems, and application communities (transport, healthcare, industrial automation, robotics, nuclear, defence, etc.).
SASSUR is one of the events that contribute to the dissemination of Treasure.
The Knowledge Manager tool
The Knowledge Manager tool
February 1, 2022
Treasure aims to improve automated traceability practices via the exploitation of ontologies, i.e., knowledge bases that represent domain concepts, their attributes and relationships, and their semantics, among other characteristics. To this end, the project is considering Knowledge Manager, an industrial tool for the management of ontologies developed by The REUSE Company.
Knowledge Manager allows users to specify knowledge from the systems engineering point of view and to handle information from requirements, models, system architectures, and other artefacts in a common system knowledge base. Such a base can be later exploited for specific systems engineering tasks, including traceability management. Treasure's solutions are benefitting from the information in the knowledge bases to enable the automation of certain traceability tasks, e.g., trace discovery.
Publication on model-based assurance evidence management
Publication on model-based assurance evidence management
December 22, 2021
Most safety-critical systems are subject to rigorous assurance processes to justify that the systems satisfy given requirements and are dependable. These processes are typically conducted in compliance with standards and require the provision of assurance evidence in the form of system artefacts, such as system specifications and testing results. The management of assurance evidence is usually a complex process because of the large number of artefacts to deal with, the amount of information (including traceability information) to gather about the artefacts, and the need to guarantee evidence quality, among other issues. As a support, we have developed a model-based approach for assurance evidence management.
The approach is one of Treasure's solutions for traceability management of safety-critical systems. It is presented in a recent journal publication:
Model-Based Assurance Evidence Management for Safety-Critical Systems. Software and Systems Modeling
Visit the Publications section for more details about this paper!
Publication on Model-Based Systems Engineering
Publication on Model-Based Systems Engineering
November 8, 2021
As the use of electronic components and systems grows, their reliability must be ensured. It is necessary that the reliability of these systems and components is analysed since early development stages and that the means used fit systems engineering practices. Within this context, we have developed a new proposal for reliability analysis at system design. The proposal aims to link two approaches: model-based systems engineering with Arcadia/Capella and knowledge-centric systems engineering with the Systems Engineering Suite. It considers traceability needs and the use of models and of ontologies to meet them, as well as compliance requirements from assurance standards for safety-critical systems such as DO-178C and ISO 26262.
The proposal, which once implemented will include Treasure's solutions for traceability management, is presented in a recent publication:
A Proposal for Model-Based Reliability-Oriented System Design in Industry. 21st IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability, and Security (QRS 2021)
Visit the Publications section for more details about this paper!
Publication on the classification of V&V methods
Publication on the classification of V&V methods
September 2, 2021
As our dependence on automated systems grows, so does the need for guaranteeing their safety, cybersecurity, and privacy. Dedicated methods for verification and validation (V&V), including traceability management, must be used to this end and it is necessary that the methods and their characteristics can be clearly differentiated. This can be achieved via method classifications. However, existing classifications might not be suitable to categorise V&V methods for safety, cybersecurity, and privacy of automated systems. They do not pay enough attention to the distinguishing characteristics of this system type and of these quality concerns.
As a solution, we've contributed to the development of a new classification that considers both the method type, e.g., testing, and the concern addressed, e.g., safety. The classification, which is a part of Treasure's framework for traceability management, is presented in a recent publication:
A Proposal for the Classification of Methods for Verification and Validation of Safety, Cybersecurity, and Privacy of Automated Systems. 14th International Conference on the Quality of Information and Communications Technology (QUATIC 2021)
Visit the Publications section for more details about this paper!
The REUSE Company
The REUSE Company
June 15, 2021
Treasure aims to improve the state of the practice on automated traceability for safety-critical systems. To this end, it is essential that the project's solutions are linked to approaches and tools currently used in industry. One of the ways to realise this objective is to build Treasure solutions from the products and services of a specific company: The REUSE Company (TRC).
TRC is a Spanish SME specialized in the application of semantic representation & analysis technologies to systems engineering in safety-critical industries (aerospace, defence, automotive, naval, health, industrial machinery…), including to traceability management. TRC supports Treasure and provides project researchers with access to its tools, so that they can reuse and extend the tools. An example is the Traceability Studio tool introduced in a past piece of news. Other tools are Knowledge Manager for specification and exploitation of domain information and RQA - Quality Studio for assessment of the suitability of system artefacts (correctness, consistency, completeness...). The use of both tools could be adapted to support automated traceability activities.
TRC will be involved in Treasure throughout the project, providing input and feedback and collaborating in the development of solutions for automated traceability. Concrete joint results will be reported in the future.
The Capella tool and the Arcadia method for Model-Based Systems Engineering
The Capella tool and the Arcadia method for Model-Based Systems Engineering
May 3, 2021
Treasure aims to improve automated traceability by exploiting model-based techniques. This also implies that the solutions developed in the project should be related to state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practices means for Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE). MBSE can be defined as the formalized application of modelling to support the different activities of a system's lifecycle (system requirements, design, verification and validation, etc.). This way, structured representations of a system and of system artefacts, e.g., traceability specifications, are used to specify and analyse the system. Such representations are typically elaborated in diagrams.
Among the existing MBSE means, Treasure is working with the Capella tool and the associated Arcadia method. They correspond to open source Eclipse means that can be freely used and extended by anyone. Capella and Arcadia are used and supported in practice by many companies and their adoption in industry is growing.
The application of Arcadia/Capella can be divided into five steps: Customer operational need analysis, System/software/ hardware need analysis, Logical architecture design, Physical architecture design, and Development contracts. It mostly corresponds to a classical system specification and refinement process from early requirements to architectural design, considering both static and dynamic aspects. Capella provides specific extension and integration mechanisms, e.g., Viewpoints for enriched system specification.
Treasure is studying different ways to exploit Capella and Arcadia to improve traceability management for safety-critical systems.
The iRel40 project
The iRel40 project
March 23, 2021
iRel40 (intelligent Reliability 4.0) is a H2020-ECSEL project in which the research team of Treasure also participates. The iRel40 consortium comprises over 70 partners from industry and academia that aim to improve the reliability of electronic components and systems by reducing failure rates along the entire value chain.
There exists a close relationship between Treasure and iRel40 and results will be jointly created in several cases. Both project will deal with model-based systems engineering. As in the VALU3S project, The REUSE Company, a Spanish SME that develops tools for systems engineering, will be among our main collaborators.
Publication on the AMASS open source ecosystem
Publication on the AMASS open source ecosystem
February 12, 2021
Traceability management for safety-critical systems is typically addressed as a part of the assurance & certification process. Because of the complexity of these activities, it is recommended that specific tool support and environments are used. An example is the AMASS open source ecosystem, which includes (1) an open source tool platform that supports the main assurance & certification activities, (2) external tools with added-value features, and (3) an open community of developers and users. This ecosystem is presented in a recent Treasure publication:
Assurance and Certification of Cyber-Physical Systems: The AMASS Open Source Ecosystem. Journal of Systems and Software, 2021
Visit the Publications section for more details about this paper!
The Traceability Studio tool
The Traceability Studio tool
January 11, 2021
Treasure aims to improve not only the state of the art on automated traceability but also the state of the practice. To this end, the project will pay great attention to Traceability Studio, an industrial tool for traceability management developed by The REUSE Company.
Traceability Studio enables the definition and implementation of trace links between two sources of information, e.g. about the requirements, design, or testing of a safety-critical system. It also supports advanced features such as trace discovery and automated impact analysis. Treasure will study the effectiveness and the efficiency of traceability management with the current tool version and determine ways to increase them.
Publication on modelling for safety assurance
Publication on modelling for safety assurance
December 4, 2020
The use of models for system assurance in general and for traceability in particular is one of the main principles of Treasure. A publication about this topic has been recently accepted at the XXXIX International Conference of the Chilean Computer Science Society (SCCC 2020)
In collaboration with researchers from Chile, the paper entitled "Automatic Generation of UML Profiles for Representing Safety Standard" presents a technique to properly create models of safety standards in the form UML profiles, avoiding deficiencies in prior work related to aspects such as class extension, attribute definition, and association usage. These models of safety standards include traceability information that can be exploited to assess whether the concrete traces managed in a project are correct and complete.
The VALU3S project
The VALU3S project
November 2, 2020
VALU3S (Verification and Validation of Automated Systems’ Safety and Security) is a H2020-ECSEL project in which the research team of Treasure also participates. The VALU3S consortium comprises over 40 partners from industry and academia that aim to evaluate state-of-the-art V&V methods and tools, and to design a multi-domain framework that provides a clear structure around the components and elements needed to conduct the V&V process.
There exists a close relationship between the work in the projects and results will be jointly created in several cases. The REUSE Company, a Spanish SME that develops tools for systems engineering, will be among the main collaborators. REUSE commercialises Traceability Studio, which is a base solution in both Treasure and VALU3S.
Publication on modelling of safety compliance needs
Publication on modelling of safety compliance needs
October 5, 2020
Several authors argue that the use models to represent safety compliance needs for critical systems, including traceability aspects, can facilitate system assurance. Such representations are structured and typically graphical, in contrast to the textual descriptions in the documents of safety standards. A recent journal publication related to Treasure demonstrates that these models can improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of the understanding of safety compliance needs:
An Empirical Evaluation of the Use of Models to Improve the Understanding of Safety Compliance Needs. Information and Software Technology, 2020
Visit the Publications section for more details about this paper!
Presentation of initial results
Presentation of initial results
September 7, 2020
Initial results of the Treasure project have already been presented at two conferences:
REFSQ 2020, 26th International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality - The AMASS Tool Platform: An Innovative Solution for Assurance and Certification of Cyber-Physical Systems
DSN 2020, 50th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks - Ontology Configuration Management for Knowledge-Centric Systems Engineering in Industry
Both publications contribute to the review of the state of the art and of the state of the practice on traceability for assurance of safety-critical systems.
Project beginning
Project beginning
July 2, 2020
As of July 1, 2020, the beginning of the Treasure project has been confirmed by the Government of the Castilla-La Mancha region in Spain. The project official length is from January 1, 2020 to March 20, 2023. It's time to start improving automated traceability! :)
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