Development of model based tools to support the design of railway control applications

Abstract

The development standard for railway control software requires several design and verification methods. To support these methods we elaborated a coherent set of tools based on UML state diagrams. To avoid the problems of the ambiguous UML semantics, we propose a subset of UML state machines that includes the practical modeling concepts and has well-defined operational semantics elaborated definitely for software engineers. Based on this formalism we developed a tool chain supporting (i) the simulation of the behavior specified by the state diagram, (ii) static checking the completeness and consistency of the specification, (iii) generation of the C source of the application control flow, (iv) automatic construction of test cases on the basis of structural test coverage criteria and (v) automatic construction of the source code of run-time verification procedures that aim at checking high-level safety properties. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.