Dr. Huang designed a new notation system Causal Mechanism Graph (CMG) to represent and model the causal mechanisms that determine safety-critical systems’ dependability. This notation system is a powerful tool that it has been used to identify the factors that threaten dependability at various phases of the system life-cycle, provide researchers an integrated framework to systematically incorporate various evidence to predict and estimate dependability risks, and guide practitioners to control risks at various gates during the system development process.
Compared to major existing graphic methods, CMG is particularly robust and suitable for mental knowledge elicitation: it allows one to represent the full range of cause-effect knowledge, accurately or fuzzily as one sees fit depending on the depth of knowledge he/she has. This feature combined with excellent reliability and validity poses CMG as a promising method that has the potential to be used in various areas, such as software dependability requirement elicitation, software dependability assessment and dependability risk control.
The journal Reliability Engineering & System Safety is ranked No.1 Journal in “Quality & Reliability” area according to Google Scholar.
The paper is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ress.2016.08.020