The Role of Formal Methods in Software Development for Railway Applications

Formal methods since thirty years have promised to be the solution for the safety certification headaches of railway software designers. In this chapter we look at the current industrial application of formal methods in the railway domain: after a recall of the dawning of formal methods in this domain, recent trends are presented, focusing in particular on formal verification by means of model checking engines, with its potential and limitations. The paper ends with a perspective into the next future, in which formal methods will be expected to pervade in more respects the production of railway software and systems.