A categorization of GSN-based safety cases and patterns

Recently modeling techniques are introduced to support safety assessment. Goal Structural Notation is one of these modeling techniques, which can be used to facilitate the development of safety argumentation and create reusable safety argumentation models. Consequently, GSN-based safety cases are widely used to demonstrate the safety of systems in safety-critical domains. Due to the amount of manual work, constructing a safety case is usually time-consuming. Moreover, the re-usability of GSN-based safety cases is limited. To address this, safety case patterns are introduced to support safety case reuse. As more and more GSN-based safety cases and patterns are designed with different goals in different contexts, it becomes hard to identify a reusable safety case or pattern. In this paper, we carried out a study on the categorization of existing GSN-based safety cases and patterns. As a result, a number of high cited publications are selected and studied. Finally a categorization of GSN-based safety cases is proposed. A clear categorization of GSN-based safety cases can be used to identify similar safety cases or patterns and facilitate safety case reuse.