Esterel Technologies>Industries>Rail Transportation

Rail Transportation

As the rail transportation industry strives to increase rail capacity and improve energy efficiency, operators must increase traffic density without compromising safety through computer-based train control and automated signaling and interlocking technology. Esterel Technologies solutions, including the SCADE® product family and accompanying professional services, provide developers of interlocking, signaling, and computer-based train control applications a formal model-based development environment for specifying, designing, developing, and deploying safety-critical embedded applications. Railway customers like Alstom, Ansaldo STS, Areva TA, NIIAS, RATP, Siemens, and Thales RSS utilize SCADE to develop and deploy safety-critical embedded control applications both on-board and track side.

As members of the SCADE product family, SCADE Suite® and SCADE Display® provide formal, unambiguous model-based development, enabling correct-by-construction designs and executable specifications for critical embedded control applications and critical embedded graphics display applications, respectively. With this formal model-based approach, developers of critical systems, especially those required to certify their applications under EN 50128 up to SIL 3/4, no longer need to wait for late-in-process testing and verification to ensure their system is safe and meets the intended requirements. With SCADE products, developers can efficiently create model-based designs that are formal, unambiguous, and correct-by-construction. Because of the rigorous semantics, SCADE provides verification and certified code generation technology that improves design reusability, maintainability, and developer productivity. With SCADE, requirements are easily traced into and throughout the design process with design documentation guaranteed to always be up-to-date. SCADE connects the entire lifecycle development tool-chain and improves communication and collaboration among the development team members.

Proven in Rail Transportation Application Development

SCADE Suite enables the efficient development of safe embedded control applications and SCADE Display has been used for creating critical control station displays for system monitoring and control.

Examples of applications that have been developed and certified using SCADE include:

• Signaling
• Interlocking
• Automatic Train Protection (ATP)
  • Emergency braking
  • Overspeed protection
• Level crossing protection
• Train detection systems (axel counters, etc.)
• Automatic Train Operation (ATO)
• ERTMS/ETCS
• Computer-based train control

Esterel Technologies has worked with certification authorities such as TUV, Certifer, RATP/AQL, and Veritas to certify applications generated from SCADE for use in the rail industry.

SCADE Benefits in Rail Transportation

• Improved communication and collaboration between operators and suppliers through formal, unambiguous graphical design entry and executable specifications
• Increased developer productivity, increased safety, and reduced time-to-certification through correct-by-construction design, automated verification, and certified code generation
• Certified code generation enables rapid iterative development, guarantees safe implementations, virtually eliminates low-level testing
• Increased maintainability and reusability through formal model-based design
• Fully integrated development tool-chain and life-cycle support
• Improved communication and collaboration between international suppliers, OEMs, and certification authorities through formal model-based design