Automated safety analysis on scenario-based requirements for train control system

Train control system is a kernel component of railway transportation which acts as the controller of the involved equipment. With the popularization of train-based transportation, how to guarantee the safety of train control system becomes an important problem to be solved. This paper proposes a safety analysis method for train control system. It provides a scenario language for practitioners to describe their requirements on the train control system in terms of physical scenarios of the train operations. With the specification written in the scenario language, its implied hazards will be automatically identified by verifying its satisfaction of the given safety properties. In contrast to the traditional textual representation of the analysis result, animation technique is adopted to demonstrate the unsafe requirement in an intuitive way. A software tool has been developed to support the approach. It identifies the hazards of a given scenario specification and animates the physical scenarios that lead to the hazards. We also carried out a case study on the tool and the result shows the efficacy of the proposed approach.