The deconstruction of safety arguments through adversarial counter-argument

The project Deconstructive Evaluation of Risk In Dependability Arguments and Safety Cases (DERIDASC) has recently experimented with techniques borrowed from literary theory as safety case analysis techniques [Armstrong. Danger: Derrida at work. Interdiscipl Sci Rev 2003;28(2):83–94. [9]; Armstrong J, Paynter S. Safe systems: construction, destruction, and deconstruction. In: Redmill F, Anderson T, editors. Proceedings of the 11th safety critical systems symposium, Bristol, UK. Berlin: Springer; 2003. p. 62–76. ISBN:1-85233-696-X. [10]]. This paper introduces our high-level framework for “deconstructing” safety arguments. Our approach is quite general and should be applicable to different types of safety argumentation framework. As one example, we outline how the approach would work in the context of the Goal Structure Notation (GSN).