MMINT-A: A Tool for Assurance Case Management

Assurance cases are structured and evidence-based arguments that a system satisfies a certain property (in given context). Indeed, they are generally accepted as best practice in various industries (e.g. healthcare) for demonstrating the safety of systems. However, managing assurance cases is generally a non-trivial task due to their potential complexity and their tight coupling with the system design; any changes to the system, which may occur frequently (especially for software), may necessitate the corresponding changes to the assurance case.

Therefore, as part of my M.Sc. at the University of Toronto and under the supervision of Prof. Marsha Chechik, I implemented a tool (MMINT-A) to support the management of assurance cases. This tool extends (and has since been incorporated into) the MMINT model management framework, which in turn is built on top of the Eclipse platform and is designed for managing collections of related system models. The two main features introduced in MMINT-A is support for change impact assessment and well-formedness checks on assurance cases, both of which have been applied to case studies in the automotive domain.

Useful Resources

  • The source code for MMINT: [GitHub]
  • My repository for MMINT-A: [GitHub]
  • Some small example projects to illustrate MMINT and MMINT-A: [GitHub]
  • A manual for installing and using MMINT (and MMINT-A): [GitHub Wiki]
  • The full list of well-formedness checks performed by MMINT-A: [PDF]

Related Publications

Below are a list of publications related to MMINT and MMINT-A that I have contributed to:

  • Two decades of assurance case tools: a survey [DOI]
    M Maksimov, NLS Fung, S Kokaly, M Chechik
    International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security, 49-59, 2018
  • MMINT-A: A Tool for Automated Change Impact Assessment on Assurance Cases [DOI]
    NLS Fung, S Kokaly, A Di Sandro, R Salay, M Chechik
    International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security, 60-70, 2018
  • Heterogeneous megamodel management using collection operators [DOI]
    R Salay, S Kokaly, A Di Sandro, NLS Fung, M Chechik
    Software and Systems Modeling 19 (1), 231-260, 2020
  • Assurance case property checking with MMINT-A and OCL [DOI]
    NLS Fung, S Kokaly, A Di Sandro, M Chechik
    Conference on Systems Engineering Research, 2020