Abstract
Abstract Purpose Recent advancements in technology have enabled railway organizations to shift from manual to computer based automated interlocking systems for increasing their efficiency and profits. Since automated systems are complex and interlocking systems are safety critical systems, these systems should be modeled and verified against safety requirements to weed out any design bugs which might lead to catastrophes during their system life cycles. In this study, we model software based automated interlocking control system of a train station, located at Rawalpindi Cantt (Pakistan). Methods We have modeled software based automated interlocking control system using timed automata and verified its correctness using UPPAAL model checking software. Timed automata have successfully been used for the modeling and verification of real-time systems. Results We constructed a real-time model of railyard interlocking system by employing a model-checking approach to determine behavior of the model under various conditions. The model checker ascertains the absence of errors in a system by inspecting all the possible states or scenarios of the modeled system. The results show that important properties related to the safety of the designed interlocking system of the railyard management system can be verified using our presented approach. These properties ranged from collision and de-railment avoidance to checking the correct error handling functionality of the timed automata models. Conclusions The final modular design can easily adapt to the route upgrades and changes within the station by simple variable adjustments. Based on the laid down methodology and verification techniques, this study can be further built upon, extended and linked to cover the shunting aspect of the train station operations, run through operations, introducing automatic train stop (ATS) functionality and recommend three to four aspect traffic signaling for the train station. This study takes a first step in providing an indigenous solution to an indigenous problem of designing an upgraded and verified signaling infrastructure for Pakistan Railway’s Rawalpindi Cantt train station.
Highlights
This paper is an extension of work originally presented in Proceedings of the Frontiers of Information Technology Conference 2015 (Khan et al 2015)
The properties were verified with UPPAAL (Larsen et al 1997) command line utility verifyta with option of reusing the state space for verifying multiple computational tree logic (CTL) statements
We have used time automata framework to model this system by extracting real time constraints from this safety critical system
Summary
This paper is an extension of work originally presented in Proceedings of the Frontiers of Information Technology Conference 2015 (Khan et al 2015). This extension includes route cancellation requests and addition of more verification properties for the designed system. The present study attempts to model and verify interlocking system of passenger lines of Rawalpindi Cantt Train Yard using a formal method modeling technique, which will be a first step in charting out an indigenous solution to the problem of automating yard operations for Rawalpindi Cantt train station
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