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9th International Workshop on Next Generation of System Assurance Approaches for Safety-Critical Systems – SASSUR 2022
ONLINE WORKSHOP, September 6th, 2022
In conjunction with the 41st International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability and Security - SAFECOMP 2022
www.sassur.org

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IMPORTANT DATES
Paper submission: May 6th, 2022
Notification to authors: May 31st, 2022
Camera-ready version: June 10th, 2022
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System assurance and certification are amongst the most expensive and time-consuming tasks in the development of critical systems, e.g., safety-critical, security-critical, privacy-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 systems such as "the connected car". This has brought a “cyber-physical” 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. The rise of notions such as cyber-physical 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 method 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, 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 for new technologies and for their application (e.g., blockchain)
- 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 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 to assure artificial intelligence
- Mixed-criticality system assurance
- Model-based system assurance and certification
- Multi-concern (safety, security, privacy, reliability…) system engineering and assurance
- Support for re-certification processes
- Technical debt for safety, security, etc.
- Tools support for assurance and certification

INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS
Authors are invited to submit short papers (max. 6 pages) or full paper (max. 12 pages) in PDF format using Easychair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sassur2022
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 2022 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.
As a distinguishing characteristic, each paper will have an assigned discussant (author of another accepted paper) that will have to perform a short critical review of the corresponding paper to trigger discussion.

WORKSHOP COMMITTEES

Organisation Committee
- Jose Luis de la Vara, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain
- Alejandra Ruiz, Tecnalia, Spain
- Antonio Kung, Trialog, France

Programme Committee
- Fabien Belmonte, Alstom, France
- Markus Borg, RISE, Sweden
- John Favaro, Trust-IT Services, Italy
- Barbara Gallina, Mälardalen University, Sweden
- Maritta Heisel, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
- Garazi Juez, BMW, Germany
- Sahar Kokaly, General Motors, Canada
- Georg Macher, Graz University of Technology, Austria
- Jabier Martinez, Tecnalia, Spain
- Thor Myklebust, SINTEF, Norway
- Philippa Ryan Conmy, Adelard, UK
- Christoph Schmittner, Austrian Institute of Technology, Austria
- Irfan Sljivo, NASA, USA
- Marc Zeller, Siemens, Germany