REVERSE ENGINEERING OF CRITICAL SOFTWARE: A MODEL-BASED APPROACH

Model-based approaches are widespread both in functional and non functional verification activities of safety-critical systems. Reverse engineering is also used to aid the check for correctness of system implementation against its requirements. In this paper we show how a model-based technique, using the Unified Modeling Language (UML), suits to the reverse engineering of complex control logics. Our case-study consists in most critical component of the European Railway Traffic Management System / European Train Control System: the Radio Block Center. UML is usually exploited to aid designers develop their software systems, using an object-oriented and bottom-up approach; however, it can be also used to model legacy non object-oriented logic processes in which there is a clear distinction between data structures and related operations, as in our case-study. The model we obtained deeply facilitated both structural and behavioral analyses, giving a valuable contribution to the static verification and improvement of the system under test.