A Lean Approach to Building Valid Model-Based Safety Arguments

Abstract

In recent decades, cyber-physical systems developed using Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) techniques have become ubiquitous in safety-critical domains. Safety assurance cases (ACs) are structured arguments designed to comprehensively show that such systems are safe; however, the reasoning steps, or strategies, used in AC arguments are often informal and difficult to rigorously evaluate. Consequently, AC arguments are prone to fallacies, and unsafe systems have been deployed as a result of fallacious ACs. To mitigate this problem, prior work [32] created a set of provably valid AC strategy templates to guide developers in building rigorous ACs. Yet instantiations of these templates remain error-prone and still need to be reviewed manually. In this paper, we report on using the interactive theorem prover Lean to bridge the gap between safety arguments and rigorous model-based reasoning. We generate formal, modelbased machine-checked AC arguments, taking advantage of the traceability between model and safety artifacts, and mitigating errors that could arise from manual argument assessment. The approach is implemented in an extended version of the MMINT-A model management tool [10]. Implementation includes a conversion of informal claims into formal Lean properties, decomposition into formal sub-properties and generation of correctness proofs. We demonstrate the applicability of the approach on two safety case studies from the literature.