Fifth semester of AMASS (and new newsletter)

AMASS has entered into its last six months towards the provision of the European-wide open platform and community for assurance and certification of cyber-physical systems! This post summarises the progress made during the fifth semester of the project, complementing previous posts on e.g. the progress during the first, second, third and fourth semesters, and the first and second project reviews.

During the fifth semester of the project, the technical work by the AMASS consortium has strongly focused on the design and implementation of the third version of the AMASS Tool Platform (Prototype P2).

For Architecture-Driven Assurance, the new features of the AMASS Prototype P2 have aimed to ensure that the provided functionalities include support for both (1) the left-hand side of the V-model at high- and low-level design and (2) the corresponding V&V activities on the right-hand side. For example, extended support has been provided for nominal and fault behavioural components specification, and to trace the elements of the architecture to assurance cases and to evidence and process data. The new results for Multi-Concern Assurance include extensions concerning the automatic generation of argument fragments for dependability assurance, the integration of safety and security analysis tools for system dependability co-analysis and co-assessment, and the management of multi-concern argument fragments for contract-based multi-concern assurance. Seamless Interoperability has been improved by largely extending the set of tools with which the AMASS Tool Platform can exchange data with, including commercial tools commonly used in CPS engineering and covering tools from practically all CPS lifecycle phases, and by providing new means for access management and data management towards enhanced collaborative work. Regarding Cross- and Intra-Domain Reuse, reuse assistance now exploits data mining and semantic technologies to identify reusable assets, new features have extended the available support for automatic argument generation and for product-, process-, and argument-related reuse via management of variability, and compliance checking uses formal approaches for compliance analysis of processes against standards.

Deliverables D3.3, D4.3, D5.3 and D6.3 describe the conceptual design for Prototype P2, D3.6, D4.6, D5.6 and D6.6 document the implementation results, and deliverables D3.8, D4.8, D5.8 and D6.8 present the methodological guidance to use the results. In relation to use by practitioners, D1.6 will present the application of the results on the industrial case studies and D1.7 the benchmarking of the results. The analysis of the features that will be deployed in each case study is currently under finalisation.

Regarding non-technical aspects, the AMASS Open Platform, composed of OpenCert, CHESS and EPF Composer and hosted by Polarsys/Eclipse, has continued its development and has been published. The Platform website has been updated, including getting started material to help the adoption of these open source tools, and an article about the AMASS Open Platform has been published in the Eclipse Foundation newsletter, which counts 250,000+ subscribers. Feedback has been collected from the EAB members at a workshop in September 2018 in Västerås, September. This workshop was held just before the SAFECOMP 2018 conference, which has been one of the main events at which AMASS partners have conducted dissemination activities, including the DECSoS, SASSUR, and WAISE workshops. Finally, the analysis of the trends and market needs that the project intends to address has been updated for exploitation-targeted purposes, and contributions to several functional safety standards and their related complementary cybersecurity standards have been made for standardisation.

The above progress and further recent work is reported in the fifth project newsletter.