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Towards formal methods diversity in railways: an experience report with seven frameworks

  • Formal Methods for Transport Systems
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Abstract

In the ever expanding universe of formal methods, several tools exist that can be exploited to validate early system designs, and that are applicable to problems of the railway domain. In this paper, we present an experience report in formal modelling and verification using seven different formal environments, namely UMC, Promela/SPIN, NuSMV, mCRL2, CPN Tools, FDR4 and CADP. In particular, we model and verify an algorithm that addresses a typical railway problem, namely deadlock avoidance in train scheduling. The algorithm is designed according to a prototypical architecture, the so-called blackboard pattern, in which a set of global data are atomically updated by a set of concurrent guarded agents. Our experience, limited to the specific problem, shows that the design of the algorithm can be translated into the different formalisms with acceptable effort, while deep proficiency with the tools is required to optimise the performance. The current paper establishes the preliminary foundations for the concept of formal methods diversity in the development of railway systems. The concept is based on the idea that if different non-certified formal environments are used to verify the same design, this increases the confidence on the verification results. Furthermore, by checking that the number of states generated during the verification process is the same for each framework, the designer can have an initial indication of the equivalence of the diverse models. The industrial application of this promising concept requires further research, and appropriate guidelines shall be established to identify the proper formal environments to use for a specific railway problem, and to define an industrial process in which formal methods diversity can be exploited at its full benefits. The paper presents the different models developed, compares the tools employed in terms of language features and performance, and discusses the industrial implications of the concept of formal methods diversity in the railway domain.

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Notes

  1. All the verification experiments have been conducted on a Mac Pro (late 2013) workstation with Quad-core 3.7 GHz Intel Xeon E5, 64 GB RAM running OS X 10.11 (El Capitan).

  2. http://fmt.isti.cnr.it/kandisti.

  3. http://fmt.isti.cnr.it/umc.

  4. http://fmt.isti.cnr.it/umc/DOCS.

  5. i.e. the sum of the sizes of the current values held by all variables.

  6. http://nusmv.fbk.eu/.

  7. The language used by UMC does not support explicit fairness constraints. Instead, fairness-related properties can be specified by means of the supported logics, e.g., \(\mu \)-Calculus.

  8. http://spinroot.com.

  9. http://www.mcrl2.org/.

  10. http://mcrl2.org/web/user_manual/tools.html.

  11. https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/projects/fdr.

  12. http://cpntools.org.

  13. CPN Tools requires a Windows system. We made our experiments both on a Windows Virtual Machine running under macOS with 64 GB RAM, and on a dedicated Windows system with 64 GB RAM. In both cases, the used memory remained far below the available memory provided by the System. The “CPN Tools State Space Manual” says that 200,000 nodes are the upper limit for the size of state spaces.

  14. http://cadp.inria.fr/.

  15. The continuously cycling model (syntactically a minimal variation of the round-trip one) has 159,374,352 states and 810,710,977 transitions.

  16. In Table 1 we show the time ranges for the one-way case. We do not show time ranges for the round-trip case, since these times are highly influenced by the memory swapping, and different operating systems were used for the round-trip experiments, due to the constraints explained in Sect. 10.

  17. The concept of specification is intended here in Jackson’s terms [40], i.e., the model that, given certain environmental assumptions, shall satisfy the requirements.

  18. A difference of + 1 or + 2 among the models is due to the different way in which the system initialisation and the system final state is modelled

  19. http://www.astrail.eu.

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Acknowledgements

This wok has been partially funded by the ASTRail project. This project received funding from the Shift2Rail Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 777561. The content of this paper reflects only the authors’ view, and the Shift2Rail Joint Undertaking is not responsible for any use that may be made of the included information.

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  1. ISTI-CNR, Via G. Moruzzi 1, Pisa, Italy

    Franco Mazzanti, Alessio Ferrari & Giorgio O. Spagnolo

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Mazzanti, F., Ferrari, A. & Spagnolo, G.O. Towards formal methods diversity in railways: an experience report with seven frameworks. Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer 20, 263–288 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-018-0488-3

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