Formal Distributed Protocol Development for Reservation of Railway Sections

Abstract

The decentralisation of railway signalling systems has the potential to increase railway network capacity, availability and reduce maintenance costs. Given the safety-critical nature of railway signalling and the complexity of novel distributed signalling solutions, their safety should be guaranteed by using thorough system validation methods. In this paper, we present a rigorous formal development and verification of a distributed protocol for reservation of railway sections, which we believe could deliver benefits of a decentralised signalling while ensuring safety and liveness properties. For the formal distributed protocol development and verification, we devised a multifaceted framework, which aims to reduce modelling and verification effort, while still providing complementary techniques to study protocol from all relevant perspectives.