Improving Railway Data Validation with ProB

Abstract

In this chapter, we describe the successful application of ProB in industrial projects realised by Siemens. Siemens is successfully using the B-method to develop software components for the zone and carborne controllers of CBTC systems. However, the development relies on certain assumptions about the actual rail network topology which have to be validated separately in order to ensure safe operation. For this purpose, Siemens has developed custom proof rules for Atelier B. Atelier B was, however, unable to deal with properties related to large constants (relations with thousands of tuples). These properties thus have, until now, had to be validated by hand at great expense (and revalidated whenever the rail network infrastructure changes). In this chapter we show how we have used ProB to overcome this challenge. We describe the deployment and current use of ProB in the SIL4 development chain at Siemens. To achieve this, it has been necessary to extend the ProB kernel for large sets and improve the constraint propagation phase. We also outline some of the effort and features involved in moving from a tool capable of dealing with medium-sized examples to one able to cope with actual industrial specifications. Notably, a new parser and type checker have had to be developed. We also touch upon the issue of validating ProB.