Automating consistency verification of safety requirements for railway interlocking systems

  • Xiaohong Chen
  • , Zhiwei Zhong
  • , Zhi Jin*
  • , Min Zhang
  • , Tong Li
  • , Xiang Chen
  • , Tingliang Zhou
  • *Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

20 Scopus citations

Abstract

Consistency verification of safety requirements is an important but still challenging task for safety-critical systems such as rail transit systems. That is mainly because requirements are typically written in natural language and with strong time constraints. Driven by the practical need from industry, in this paper we propose a systematic approach to specify safety requirements in a quasi-natural language and automatically verify their consistency using formal methods. Specifically, we define a domain specific language SafeNL to specify safety requirements, and then automatically transform them into formal constraints defined in the Clock Constraint Specification Language (CCSL). The transformed constraints can be automatically and efficiently verified by model checking. We conduct two practical case studies to analyze the safety requirements of an interlocking system in CASCO Signal Ltd. Results of the studies show the validity and utility of our approach can pragmatically contribute to industrial practice. We also report some lessons learned from case studies.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2019 IEEE 27th International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE 2019
EditorsDaniela Damian, Anna Perini, Seok-Won Lee
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages308-318
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781728139128
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 2019
Event27th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE 2019 - Jeju Island, Korea, Republic of
Duration: 23 Sep 201927 Sep 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering
Volume2019-September
ISSN (Print)1090-705X
ISSN (Electronic)2332-6441

Conference

Conference27th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE 2019
Country/TerritoryKorea, Republic of
CityJeju Island
Period23/09/1927/09/19

Keywords

  • CCSL
  • Consistency Verification
  • Interlocking System
  • SafeNL
  • Safety Requirements

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