Automatic instantiation of abstract tests on specific configurations for large critical control systems

Computer-based control systems have grown in size, complexity, distribution and criticality. In this paper a methodology is presented to perform an abstract testing of such large control systems in an efficient way: an abstract test is specified directly from system functional requirements and has to be instantiated in more test runs to cover a specific configuration, comprising any number of control entities (sensors, actuators and logic processes). Such a process is usually performed by hand for each installation of the control system, requiring a considerable time effort and being an error prone verification activity. To automate a safe passage from abstract tests, related to the so called generic software application, to any specific installation, an algorithm is provided, starting from a reference architecture and a state-based behavioural model of the control software. The presented approach has been applied to a railway interlocking system, demonstrating its feasibility and effectiveness in several years of testing experience

Component-based modeling and observer-based verification for railway safety-critical applications

1th International Symposium on Formal Aspects of Component Software , Bertinoro, Italie, 10-/09/2014 - 12/09/2015International audienceOne of the challenges that engineers face, during the development process of safety-critical systems, is the verification of safety application models before implementation. Formalization is important in order to verify that the design meets the specified safety requirements. In this paper, we formally describe the set of transformation rules, which are defined for the automatic transformation of safety application source models to timed automata target models. The source models are based on our domain-specific component model, named SARA, dedicated to SAfety-critical RAilway control applications. The target models are then used for the observer-based verification of safety requirements. This method provides an intuitive way of expressing system properties without requiring a significant knowledge of higher order logic and theorem proving, as required in most of existing approaches. An experimentation over a chosen benchmark at rail-road crossing protection application is shown to highlight the proposed approach

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India