SmartGSN: an online tool to semi-automatically manage assurance cases

TL;DR

This paper addresses the manual, tedious process of developing and maintaining assurance cases for mission-critical systems by introducing SmartGSN, an online tool that semi-automates GSN-based assurance-case management using Large Language Models. It describes a three-tier web-based architecture (presentation with React, business with LLM-driven logic, and data with Firebase) and a workflow that instantiates ACPs, detects ACPs within ACs, and converts structured prose to GSN diagrams, all while supporting editing and export. An empirical evaluation across six ACPs and five ACs from five domains demonstrates that SmartGSN can reliably detect patterns at lower metric thresholds using Zero-shot + Chain-of-Thought prompts with BLEU and Cosine Similarity as similarity metrics; results suggest an effective operating band around thresholds in the 0.2–0.6 range, with some domain-specific challenges. The work contributes a functional online tool, a concrete technology stack, and an empirical validation of pattern-detection capabilities, offering practical utility for researchers and practitioners and a basis for future enhancements such as collaboration features, refactoring support, and user studies.

Abstract

Developing industry-wide standards and ensuring producers of mission-critical systems comply with them is crucial to fostering consumer acceptance. Producers of such systems can rely on assurance cases to demonstrate to regulatory authorities how they have complied with such standards to help prevent system failure, which could result in fatalities and environmental damage. In this paper, we introduce SmartGSN, an innovative online tool that relies on Large Language Models to (semi-)automate the management of assurance cases complying with GSN - a very popular notation to graphically represent assurance cases. The evaluation of SmartGSN demonstrates its strong capability to detect assurance case patterns within the assurance cases manually created for five systems spanning several application domains. SmartGSN is accessible online at [https://smartgsn.vercel.app], and a demonstration video can be viewed at [https://youtu.be/qLrTHf-SZbM]

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: A sample assurance case pattern adapted from b1
• Figure 2: SmartGSN core supporting technologies
• Figure 3: Partial Assurance Case Pattern Detection Interface