Conception of a formal model-based methodology to support railway engineers in the specification and verification of interlocking systems

The use of formal modeling is gaining popularity in the development of safety-critical transport applications, in particular railway interlocking systems, due to its ability to specify the functionality of systems using mathematically precise logical rules. The goal of the research described here is to con-ceptualize a methodology that provides a specification/verification environment supporting the developers (domain engineers) in the construction and verification of formal specifications. The aim of the methodology is to decrease the need for mathematical-computer science background/knowledge at the system engineering level. The proposed approach includes a set of well-known and widely used methods, techniques, and tools to specify and verify the functionality related to the development of railway interlocking systems, such as structured and object-oriented formalisms (e.g., the Unified Modeling Language), model-driven development, model checking, etc. The application of the methodology facilitates the construction of correct, complete, consistent, and verifiable functional specifications of a given component. This in turn brings a significant improvement of quality, and distributes the development costs more evenly among the related life-cycle phases.