The SafeCap platform for modelling railway safety and capacity

Abstract

This paper describes a tooling platform that supports reasoning about railway capacity while ensuring system safety. It uses a Domain Specific Language (DSL) that allows signalling engineers to design stations and junctions, to check their safety and to evaluate the potential improvements of capacity while applying various alteration patterns that change the railway schemas. The platform uses a combination of model checking and SMT solving to verify system safety in the most efficient and user-friendly way. It includes several plug-ins that evaluate various capacity parameters. The tool uses the Eclipse technology, including its EMF and GMF frameworks. It has been developed in close cooperation with the Invensys Rail engineers and applied in a variety of mediumscale projects, which has demonstrated its ability to help understand the effects that changes in the plans and schemas can potentially have on capacity. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.