Towards Continuous Assurance with Formal Verification and Assurance Cases

Abstract

Autonomous systems must sustain justified confidence in their correctness and safety across their operational lifecycle-from design and deployment through post-deployment evolution. Traditional assurance methods often separate development-time assurance from runtime assurance, yielding fragmented arguments that cannot adapt to runtime changes or system updates - a significant challenge for assured autonomy. Towards addressing this, we propose a unified Continuous Assurance Framework that integrates design-time, runtime, and evolution-time assurance within a traceable, model-driven workflow as a step towards assured autonomy. In this paper, we specifically instantiate the design-time phase of the framework using two formal verification methods: RoboChart for functional correctness and PRISM for probabilistic risk analysis. We also propose a model-driven transformation pipeline, implemented as an Eclipse plugin, that automatically regenerates structured assurance arguments whenever formal specifications or their verification results change, thereby ensuring traceability. We demonstrate our approach on a nuclear inspection robot scenario, and discuss its alignment with the Trilateral AI Principles, reflecting regulator-endorsed best practices.