Towards Domain-Specific Formal Specification Languages for Railway Control Systems

Author: Jan Peleska, Alexander Baer and Anne E. Haxthausen

Abstract:
The authors motivate and illustrate an approach for domain-specific specification languages in the field of small local railway or tramway control systems. Adopting terms and concepts from the application domain, such languages are the ideal means of communication between users, system engineers and control computer specialists. Semantic rigour is provided by a transformation of the domain-specific representation into wide-spectrum formal specification languages. These transformations offer the possibilities of formal verification and testing against formal specifications, as well as automatic generation of executable programs from specifications. The construction of the transformation can be substantially simplified if the class of control systems is formalised in a generic way using design patterns and frameworks.

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