A Story about Formal Methods Adoption by a Railway Signaling Manufacturer

This paper reports the story of the introduction of formal methods in the development process of a railway signaling manufacturer. The first difficulty for a company is due to the many different formal methods proposals around; we show how this difficulty has been addressed and how the choice of a reference formal specification notation and of the related tools has been driven by many external factors related to the specific application domain, to the company policies, to european regulations. Cooperation with University has been fundamental in this process, which is now at the stage in which internal acceptance of the chosen formalisms and tools is established.