(Apologies for multiple postings)
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13th International Workshop on Next Generation of System Assurance Approaches for Critical Systems – SASSUR 2026
September 22nd, 2026
In conjunction with the 45th International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability and Security - SafeComp 2026
www.sassur.org
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IMPORTANT DATES
Paper submission: May 4th, 2026
Notification of acceptance: May 25th, 2026
Camera-ready submission: June 8th, 2026
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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, such as 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 technological advancements of critical systems, e.g., towards open, interconnected, networked, intelligent systems. This poses new challenges in ensuring safety, as well as other dependability concerns such as security, availability, robustness, and reliability. In general, practitioners expect improvements in the available methods and tool support for system 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.).
TOPICS
Contributions are sought in (but are not limited to) the following topics:
- Agile approaches in the context of critical systems
- Assurance and certification of autonomous or adaptive systems
- Assurance case development
- Assurance for new technologies and for their application (e.g., edge AI and digital twins)
- COTS or external sourcing management of evidence in critical systems
- Cross-domain product certification
- Emergent V&V needs for assurance and certification
- Evolution of standards and trends on regulations
- Evolutionary approaches for system assurance
- Human factors in system 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.
- Tools support for assurance and certification
INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS
Authors are invited to submit short papers (6 pages; including references) or full paper (max. 12 pages; including references) in PDF format using Easychair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sassur2026
Submissions must conform to the Springer LNCS formatting guidelines (https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines). 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 2026 Workshops proceedings (LNCS series in the last years). At least one author of each accepted paper must register to the workshop and present the paper so that it is included in the proceedings.
ORGANISATION COMMITTEE
- Jose Luis de la Vara. University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain
- Barbara Gallina. Mälardalen University, Sweden