Model-Driven Engineering of a Railway Interlocking System

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) promises to enhance system development by reducing development time, and increasing productivity and quality. MDE is gaining popularity in several industry sectors, and is attractive also for critical systems where they can reduce efforts and costs for verification and validation (V&V), and can ease certification. Incorporating model-driven techniques into a legacy well-proven development cycle is not simply a matter of placing models and transformations in the design and implementation phases. We present the experience in the model-driven design and V&V of a safety-critical system in the railway domain, namely the Prolan Block, a railway interlocking system manufactured by the Hungarian company Prolan Co., required to be CENELEC SIL-4 compliant. The experience has been carried out in an industrial-academic partnership within the EU project CECRIS. We discuss the challenges and the lessons learnt in this pilot project of introducing MD design and testing techniques into the company's traditional V-model process.