Model-driven software engineering in the openETCS project: project experiences and lessons learned

Model-driven software engineering in industrial practice has been the focus of different empirical studies and experience reports. Particularly, positive effects of model-driven software engineering have been reported in the domain of embedded and safety-critical systems. We report in this paper on the experiences of the openETCS European research project whose goal was to formalize the System Requirements Specification and to develop an open source reference implementation of the European Train Control System including open source modeling tools. Furthermore, we will discuss lessons learned, e.g., about using open source modeling toolchains in safety-critical contexts and about using the SCADE Suite for the development of the safety-critical parts.