Development of Communication Protocol Verification Tool for Vital Railway Signaling Systems

Abstract

As a very important part in development of the protocol, verifications for developed protocol specification are complementary techniques that are used to increase the level of confidence in the system functions by their specifications. Using the informal method for specifying the protocol, some ambiguity may be contained therein. This indwelling ambiguity in control systems can cause the occurrence of accidents, especially in the case of safety-critical systems. To clear the vagueness contained in the designed protocol, we use the LTS (Labeled Transition System) model to design the protocol for railway signaling. And then, we verify the safety and the liveness properties formally through the model checking method. The modal <TEX>${\mu}$</TEX>-calculus, which is an expressive method of temporal logic, has been applied to the model checking method. We verify the safety and liveness properties of Korean standard protocol for railway signaling systems. To perform automatic verification of the safety and liveness properties of the designed protocol, a communication verification tool is implemented. The developed tools are implemented by C++ language under Windows XP. It is expected to increase the safety and reliability of communication protocol for signaling systems by using the developed communication verification tool.