Towards a case-based reasoning approach for safety assurance reuse

The increasing complexity and size of electronic systems in the aerospace industry, combined with the growing market demand, requires the industry to implement an efficient safety assurance strategy. Reuse of safety argumentation and evidence for certification is one of the potential means for achieving such a strategy. Typically, major problems arise when the evolution of complex avionics entails the reconstruction of the entire body of safety justification, often resulting in expensive and time-consuming assurance and certification processes. This paper investigates the use of Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) as a strategy for representing, retrieving and reusing previously assured safety cases. This is supported by the existence of patterns of safety cases, which determine a unified knowledge representation scheme for retrieving further safety cases. We illustrate the approach with the development of modular argumentation for an Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) platform.