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Incremental Development of a Safety Critical System Combining formal Methods and DSMLs

− Application to a Railway System −

  • Conference paper
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Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems (FMICS 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11687))

Abstract

In order to assist domain experts, several tools exist for the definition of graphical or textual domain specific modeling languages (DSMLs). The resulting models are useful, but not sufficient, for an overall understanding of the system, especially when formal methods are being applied. Indeed, formal methods failures often result from misunderstandings of the requirements, even if the system is entirely proved. This is confirmed by several industrial experiments which showed that the poor readability of the formal notations is not convenient for communication with domain experts and hence the validation activity is often tedious, time consuming and complex. In order to circumvent this shortcoming, we propose to make domain specific models provable and also executable thanks to the animation of their expected behaviour directly in a dedicated DSML tool. Our approach starts from an intuitive description of the system’s operational semantics thanks to high-level Petri-nets which abstract away structural constraints and focus on safety-critical behaviours. Then we take benefit of the B method in order to refine and prove these operational semantics on the one hand, and to merge them with the static semantics of a given DSML, on the other hand. This work is applied to the design of ERTMS/ETCS 3 which is an emergent solution for railway system management.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://vasco.imag.fr/tools/meeduse/.

  2. 2.

    ERTMS: European Rail Traffic Management System.

    ETCS: European Train Control System.

  3. 3.

    https://www.southampton.ac.uk/abz2018/information/case-study.page.

  4. 4.

    European Vital Computer.

  5. 5.

    Radio Block Center.

  6. 6.

    https://www.eclipse.org/modeling/emf/.

  7. 7.

    https://www.obeo.fr/fr/produits/eclipse-sirius.

  8. 8.

    http://vasco.imag.fr/tools/meeduse/.

  9. 9.

    For place reason we do not develop the animation technique in this paper. Demonstration videos of Meeduse with graphical and textual DSL animation can be found at: http://vasco.imag.fr/tools/meeduse/.

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Correspondence to Akram Idani .

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Idani, A., Ledru, Y., Ait Wakrime, A., Ben Ayed, R., Collart-Dutilleul, S. (2019). Incremental Development of a Safety Critical System Combining formal Methods and DSMLs. In: Larsen, K., Willemse, T. (eds) Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems. FMICS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11687. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27008-7_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27008-7_6

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