On Tuesday May 28th 2013 I gave a talk at the Alpine Verification Meeting in Trento Italy with the title “Recent Advances in Causality Checking”.
Abstract: In recent work on the safety analysis of systems we have shown how causal relationships amongst events can be algorithmically inferred from probabilistic counterexamples and subsequently be mapped to fault trees. The resulting fault trees were significantly smaller and hence easier to understand than the corresponding probabilistic counterexample, but still contain all information needed to discern the causes for the occurrence of a hazard. More recently we have developed an approach called Causality Checking which is integrated into the state-space exploration algorithms used for qualitative model checking and which is capable of computing causality relationships on-the-fly. The causality checking approach outperforms the probabilistic causality computation in terms of run-time and memory consumption, but can not provide a probabilistic measure. In my talk I will give an introduction to causality checking and probabilistic causality computation. Furthermore I will discuss how the strengths of both approaches can be combined to an approach where the causal events are computed using causality checking and the probability computation can be limited to the causal events.
The slides of my talk can be downloaded here.
