Consistency checking of safety arguments in the Goal Structuring Notation standard

Justification of software conformance against specifications and standards is a strong requirment for safety-critical applications. Certification bodies require the construction of assurance cases. In an assurance case, the evidence supporting the claims is collected throughout the entire development cycle of a the safety application. The challange is to build well-structured and coherent safety cases, given that the available technological instrumentation does not focus on automatic reasoning and verification of the safety case. In this paper, we propose a tool that facilitates the construction and automatic assessment of safety cases. The tool supports the Goal Structuring Notation (GSN) standard for creation of safety arguments. The GSN diagrams are translated in description logic, in order to formally check various properties of the safety case. A running scenario is illustrated in the domain of vehicular networks.