Semantic Support for Log Analysis of Safety-Critical Embedded Systems

Testing is a relevant activity for the development life-cycle of Safety Critical Embedded systems. In particular, much effort is spent for analysis and classification of test logs from SCADA subsystems, especially when failures occur. The human expertise is needful to understand the reasons of failures, for tracing back the errors, as well as to understand which requirements are affected by errors and which ones will be affected by eventual changes in the system design. Semantic techniques and full text search are used to support human experts for the analysis and classification of test logs, in order to speedup and improve the diagnosis phase. Moreover, retrieval of tests and requirements, which can be related to the current failure, is supported in order to allow the discovery of available alternatives and solutions for a better and faster investigation of the problem.Comment: EDCC-2014, BIG4CIP-2014, Embedded systems, testing, semantic discovery, ontology, big dat

Business optimization through automated signaling design

M.Ing. (Engineering Management)Abstract: Railway signaling has become pivotal in the development of railway systems over the years. There is a global demand for upgrading signaling systems for improved efficiency. Upgrading signaling systems requires new signaling designs and modifications to adjacent signaling systems. The purpose of this research is to compare manually produced designs with design automation by covering the framework of multiple aspects of railway signaling designs in view of business optimization using computer drawings, programming software language and management of signaling designs. The research focuses on design automation from the preliminary design stage to the detailed design stage with the intention of investigating and resolving a common project challenge of time management. Various autonomous methods are used to seek improvement on the detailed design phase of re-signaling projects. An analysis on the project’s duration, resources and review cycles is conducted to demonstrate the challenges that are faced during the design of a project. Signaling designs are sophisticated and crucial in an ever-changing railway environment. As a result, there is a demand for efficiency and knowledge within railway signaling to achieve successful completion project target dates. A quantitative approach is used to identify the gaps leading to delays and best practices are applied using a comparative analysis to remediate on any snags that may potentially extend the project duration. The results illustrate that the resources required when automating detailed designs are reduced by two thirds for cable plans and book of circuits and reduced by one third for source documents. Successively, the projects benefit with reduced organizational resources, reduced design durations and reduced design review cycles. This research concludes that software integration of the signaling designs due to the efficiency and innovation of the selected computer drawing software and programming software language such as AutoCAD required less resources for computer drawings that are generated using automation tools compared to computer drawings that are generated manually. The resources required when automating the generation of signaling detailed designs are reduced for cable plans, book of circuits and source documents. This means that the business is optimized by utilizing less resources and subsequently delays are reduced during the design stage

An analysis of the benefits of EULYNX-style requirements modeling for ProRail

Modeling has recently well accepted in various fields such asautomotive, aerospace, telecom industries, and railways. It brings many benefits such as creating an unambiguous method for specifying and interpretation a system, or facilitating an early validation and verification of the completeness of requirements. The EULYNX project uses models to specify subsystem interface requirements. This is an innovative way in comparison with specifying using the textual style requirements. For any systems, especially a safety critical system like the railway signaling domain, it is important to specify unambiguous. In contrary to legacy systems, for the future with modern technology, ProRail has to consider to apply state-of-the-art specification methods, such as modeling. Therefore ProRail desires to investigate the benefit of EULYNX requirements to its organization. This report describes the project to analyze the benefit of EULYNX style models to ProRail. A research and analysis of the existing EULYNX and ProRail’s specifications is carried out. Afterwards, the methodological approach to model is developed and implemented. This approach supports checking the current position of ProRail in EULYNX, checking the potential benefit of models to ProRail. One of the main deliveries of the project, based on the project analysis, are the recommendations for ProRail and EULYNX from the modeling point of view