Improvement of Processes and Methods in Testing Activities for Safety-Critical Embedded Systems.

In order to sustain competitiveness in transport domain, especially in automotive, aerospace and rail, it is extremely important to control and optimize the entire development process of complex safety-critical embedded systems. In this context, the ARTEMIS EU-project CESAR 1 (Cost-Efficient methods and processes for SAfety Relevant embedded systems) aims to boost cost efficiency of embedded systems development, safety and certification processes by an order of magnitude. We want to achieve the above target in the railway domain with particular emphasis on the Verification and Validation (V&V) process where activities to be performed, due to their complexity, require a significant amount of economical resources. Starting from an industrial use case (the On-Board Unit of the European Railway Traffic Management System Level 1, ERTMS L1) we provide a methodology that overcomes some weaknesses in testing processes. It supports requirements analysis and automatic test cases generation, avoiding a computational explosion.