Improving verification process in driverless metro systems: the MBAT project

Complex systems are experiencing increasing needs to obtain a higher level of safety and to reduce time to market. This is in particular true for automotive, aerospace and railway domains, pushing the research community to define novel development and verification methods and techniques. The ARTEMIS EU-project MBAT (Combined Model-Based Analysis and Testing of Embedded Systems) represents one of the most important attempts in this direction since it aims to achieve such improvements in several application domains. Starting from the Ansaldo STS implementation of Communication-Based Train Control system (CBTC), which is the base of automatic driverless metro systems, we describe in this paper the improvement that MBAT would bring to the Verification process. To this aim an accurate description of existing Verification process in automatic metro systems and discussion about critical points are provided. Then we describe the expected results of MBAT project on such kind of processes. The proposed approach and developed tools will be part of a common reference platform and, also if related to the railway domain, for its generality, they can be used for different domains with similar needs. The basic agreement in the project will guarantee the cross use of the platform and will give quantitative measures of the obtained improvement.