Automatically Detecting Fallacies in System Safety Arguments

Yuan, Tangming; Manandhar, Suresh; Kelly, Tim; Wells, Simon

Abstract

Safety cases play a significant role in the development of safety-critical systems. The key components in a safety case are safety arguments, that are designated to demonstrate that the system is acceptably safe. Inappropriate reasoning with safety arguments could undermine a system’s safety claims which in turn contribute to safety-related failures of the system. Currently, safety argument reviews are conducted manually, require expensive expertise and are often labour intensive. It would therefore be desirable if software can be employed to help with the detection of flaws in the arguments. A prerequisite for this approach is the need for a formal representation of safety arguments. This paper proposes a predicate logic based representation of safety arguments and a method to detect argument fallacies. It is anticipated that the work contributes to the field of the safety case development as well as to the area of computational fallacies.

Citation

Yuan, T., Manandhar, S., Kelly, T., & Wells, S. (2016). Automatically Detecting Fallacies in System Safety Arguments. In Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems (47-59). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46218-9_4

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (Published)
• Conference Name: 15th International Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument (CMNA15)
• Start Date: Oct 26, 2015
• End Date: Oct 26, 2015
• Acceptance Date: May 31, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Dec 1, 2016
• Publication Date: Dec 1, 2016
• Deposit Date: Jun 15, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 16, 2017
• Electronic ISSN: 1611-3349
• Publisher: Springer
• Pages: 47-59
• Series Title: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Series Number: 9935
• Series ISSN: 0302-9743
• Book Title: Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems
• Chapter Number: 5
• ISBN: 9783319462172
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46218-9_4
• Keywords: Safety-critical systems, safety arguments, safety case development,
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/947037
• Contract Date: Jun 15, 2017