Model-driven availability evaluation of railway control systems

Maintenance of real-world systems is a complex task involving several actors, procedures and technologies. Proper approaches are needed in order to evaluate the impact of different maintenance policies considering cost/benefit factors. To that aim, maintenance models may be used within availability, performability or safety models, the latter developed using formal languages according to the requirements of international standards. In this paper, a model-driven approach is described for the development of formal maintenance and reliability models for the availability evaluation of repairable systems. The approach facilitates the use of formal models which would be otherwise difficult to manage, and provides the basis for automated models construction. Starting from an extension to maintenance aspects of the MARTE-DAM profile for dependability analysis, an automated process based on model-to-model transformations is described. The process is applied to generate a Repairable Fault Trees model from the MARTE-DAM specification of the Radio Block Centre - a modern railway controller.