Collaborative Research: DASS: Accountable Software Systems for Safety-Critical Applications

Safety-critical software systems are entering the market in large numbers and are expected to transform many industries including healthcare, transportation, manufacturing, and others. In response to the rising societal impact and complexity of software systems, lawmakers and regulatory authorities are implementing new laws, regulations, and guidelines to hold software accountable for its harmful effects.

These legal approaches differ across jurisdictions and across application domains, and they will evolve over time as lawmakers and regulators continue to study and address emerging software capabilities. Despite this mounting regulatory pressure, state-of-the-art software-design methodologies are deficient at providing the desired accountability in safety-critical systems.

The project’s novelties are twofold: (1) developing principled approaches and tools for assuring and demonstrating accountability of safety-critical software systems with respect to laws and regulations that evolve over time, and (2) advancing a legal framework that harmonizes regulatory oversight of software systems across heterogeneous safety-critical domains. The project’s impacts are facilitating the design of safety-critical software systems that are accountable with respect to various regulations, and providing legal insight on how to extend or amend current regulatory approaches to enhance software accountability.

In addition, the investigators will organize a series of interdisciplinary workshops and symposiums to bring together experts in software design and law to discuss open research questions and potential solutions to software accountability. The investigators also plan to develop new course materials in computer science and law to integrate the proposed research outcomes, and actively recruit underrepresented students for positions in the proposed project.

The project includes three research thrusts that seek to make fundamental contributions to both software design and law. The first thrust creates novel approaches and tools for developing compositional dynamic assurance cases throughout the software development lifecycle to assure and demonstrate accountability. The second thrust develops novel formal-verification techniques for generating provable and certifiable regulation compliance guarantees, which can be used as evidence in assurance cases.

The third thrust develops legal insight on how lawmakers and regulators should extend or amend current regulatory approaches to incorporate advances in software accountability methods.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.