Towards model-driven V&V assessment of railway control systems

Verification and Validation activities for the certification of railway controllers are among the most critical and time-consuming in system development life- cycle. As such, they would greatly benefit from novel ap- proaches enabling both automation and traceability for assessment purposes. While several formal and Model-Based approaches have been proposed in the scientific literature, some of which are successfully employed in industrial settings, we are still far from integrated and unified tools which allows to guide design choices, to minimize the chances of failures/non-compliances, and to considerably reduce the overall assessment effort. To address these issues, this paper describes a Model-Driven Engineering approach which is very promising to tackle the aforementioned challenges. In fact, the usage of appropriate Domain Specific Modeling Languages and/or UML profiles featuring system analysis and test case specification capabilities, together with tool-chains for model transformation and analysis, seems the most vi- able way to allow end-users to concentrate on high-level holistic models and specification of non-functional requirements (i.e. dependability) and support the automation of the Verification and Validation process. We show through a case-study in the railway signaling domain how the approach is effective in supporting activities like system testing and availability evaluation.