Damir Nesic

From September 2015 to September 2020 I have been a PhD student working in the are of functional safety for highly configurable systems. Over the years, my research activities narrowed down to question of how to construct a valid and convincing safety case for a highly configurable system that has many variants. Answering the question involved defining methods, principles, and tool support for the creation of such safety cases. An underlying assumption was that every-day engineering should, and can be made more rigorous, hence the name of my research group; Rigorous Systems Engineering (read more here).

From October 2020, I'm working on the position of a method developer in Scania CV AB, within the systems safety group. In general, my work supports the harmonization with various safety standards such as ISO26262, upcoming General Safety Regulation etc. More precisely, my work includes design or modification of working methods, processes, and tool-support, to enable efficient development of future products.

Prior to my PhD studies, I spent several years in the medical domain as an embedded-systems engineer in R&D. This experience was my first taste of safety-critical systems and the first encounter with the question that drives my career since then: How do you know that a system is safe?

Doctoral dissertation:

• "Automated Creation of Safety Cases for Highly Configurable Systems". D. Nesic. KTH Royal Institute of Technology, 2020. DiVA link.

Latest publications:

• "A probabilistic model of belief in safety cases". D. Nesic, M.Nyberg, B.Gallina. Safety Science. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2021.105187

• "Product-line assurance cases from contract-based design". D. Nesic, M.Nyberg, B.Gallina. Journal of Systems and Software. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2021.110922

• "Building a Web-Based Federated Toolchain: Lessons Learned From a Four-Year Industrial Project", D. Nesic. J. El-Khoury, J. Westman, M. Nyberg. International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services (iiWAS 2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3366030.3366043. Slides presentation_iiwas.pptx
• "Modular Safety Cases for Product Lines based on Assume-Guarantee Contracts", D Nesic, M. Nyberg. In the 7th International Workshop on Assurance Cases for Software-intensive Systems at SAFECOMP 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26250-1_3 Slides presentation.pptx
• "Principles of Feature Modeling", D. Nesic, J. Krüger, S. Stanciulescu, T. Berger. 27th ACM Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1145/3338906.3338974. Slides presentation.pptx, pdf
• "Constructing Product-Line Safety Cases from Contract-Based Specifications", D Nesic, M. Nyberg, B. Gallina. The 34th Symposum of Applied Computing 2019, Software Intensive Systems of Systems track. https://doi.org/10.1145/3297280.3297479.
• "Verifying Contract-Based Specification using Description Logic", D. Nesic, M. Nyberg. The 31st International Workshop on Description Logic 2018. (Author version pdf)
• "Tackling combinatorial explosion: a study of industrial needs and practises for analyzing highly configurable systems", M. Mukelabai, D Nesic et al. The 33rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1145/3238147.3238201 (Author version pdf)