Abstract

Society is becoming increasingly reliant upon the dependability of computerbased systems. Achieving and demonstrating the dependability of systems requires the construction and review of valid and coherent arguments. This paper discusses the need for a variety of classes of arguments in dependable systems and reviews existing approaches to the representation of arguments in each of these classes. The issues surrounding the certification of safety critical systems demonstrate the current need for richer representations of dependability arguments which support tools for their construction and review. The paper discusses how a meta-logical framework, informed by aspects of both formal and informal logic, offers a rich and unified means of representing dependability arguments and of thus addressing this need