SASSUR 2024 - Call for papers

(Apologies for multiple postings)

********************************************************************
11th International Workshop on Next Generation of System Assurance Approaches for Critical Systems – SASSUR 2024
September 17th, 2024
In conjunction with the 43rd International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability and Security - SafeComp 2024
www.sassur.org
********************************************************************
IMPORTANT DATES
Paper submission: May 6th, 2024
Notification of acceptance: May 27th, 2024
Camera-ready submission: June 10th, 2024
********************************************************************

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, 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. In addition, re-certification is usually required for any evolution of the system. 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 "the connected car". 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, privacy, and security engineering, the recently coined explainability engineering, certification processes, model-based engineering, software and hardware design, critical systems, and application communities (transport, healthcare, industrial automation, robotics, nuclear, defence, etc.).

TOPICS
Contributions are sought in (but are not limited to) the following topics:
- Assurance and certification of autonomous or adaptive systems
- Assurance for new technologies and for their application (e.g., blockchain and edge AI)
- COTS or external sourcing management of evidence in critical systems
- Cross-domain product certification
- Emergent V&V needs for assurance and certification
- Engineering processes, lifecycles, and methodologies in the context of critical systems (incl. agile ones)
- Evolution of standards and trends on regulations
- Evolutionary approaches for system assurance
- Human factors in dependability assurance
- Industrial challenges for cost-effective assurance and certification of critical systems
- Integration of process-centric and product-centric assurance
- Management of assurance evidence
- Management of compliance with standards and regulations
- Methods and techniques for artificial intelligence assurance
- Mixed-criticality system assurance
- Model-based system assurance and certification
- Multi-concern (safety, security, privacy, reliability, explainability…) system engineering and assurance
- Support for re-certification processes
- Technical debt for safety, security, privacy, etc.
- Tool support for assurance and certification

INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS
Authors are invited to submit short papers (6 pages) or full paper (max. 12 pages) in PDF format using Easychair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sassur2024
Submissions must conform to the Springer LNCS formatting guidelines (https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/editor-guidelines-for-springer-proceedings). Papers will be peer-reviewed through a regular refereeing procedure, with a minimum of three reviewers per paper. If accepted for presentation, the papers will be published in the SafeComp 2024 Workshops proceedings (LNCS series in the last years). At least one author of each accepted paper must register to the workshop so that the paper is included in the proceedings.

ORGANISATION COMMITTEE
- Jose Luis de la Vara, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain
- Barbara Gallina, Mälardalen University, Sweden