Principles for Systematic Development of an Assurance Case Template from ISO 26262

A failure in a critical system can cause death, injury, financial loss, and environmental damage. To develop safe and trustworthy systems, we need to plan the development and assessment of system functionality in advance. Assurance Cases are a generalization of Safety Cases, and are gaining momentum as a preferred way of demonstrating assurance of critical properties in complex software-intensive systems. To cope with the lack of standardized assurance structures, and to encourage safety assessment prior to development, we previously proposed the use of an assurance case template. The principles presented here can be used to build an assurance case template that complies with the functional safety standard, ISO 26262 in a cost-effective way. In the future, such principles may lead to semi-automated development of these templates.