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Ansaldo STS

Managing the Execution of a SCADE Suite® Development Project with Ansaldo STS

Ansaldo STS is a leading technology company operating in the global railway and mass transit transportation systems business with the provision of traffic management, planning, train control and signalling systems and services. It acts as lead contractor and turnkey provider on major projects worldwide. Ansaldo STS focuses on seven main business areas: high speed; main lines and freight; mass transit and light rail; computer-based interlocking; planning, supervision and traffic control; components; and operations and maintenance.

Ansaldo STS chose SCADE Suite for the development of the CBTC Carbonne Controller (CC). The CC has over 3000 individual inputs, 13 processors working at the same time, and 10 software and 26 hardware devices including radio, transponders and tachometers. Eight development teams in the United States and France work on the CC. The CC is used on four customers' projects: Alifana, Shenyang, Ankara and Taipei.

Ansaldo STS's goals were clear; they strived to satisfy their customers while reducing waste in the supply chain and limiting the amount of rework within systems engineering. They were able to do this by streamlining the testing phase. By starting testing much sooner than possible with a traditional development process, and then testing continuously through the process, SCADE Suite allowed the CC developers to align their development along test stages, resulting in a reduced time to market. SCADE Suite supported a four step testing strategy; model testing within SCADE Suite, host integration testing of the SCADE model with communications protocols, target based integration testing and finally system integration testing. Each integration stage validates a subset of interfaces allowing for testing the modules reliably. Because SCADE Suite ensures that all models are correct by construction, testing is completed earlier and more accurately.

Ansaldo STS hopes to transfer the testing processes made possible by using SCADE Suite to testing at the specification level, requiring less paper and less testing. The next generation of Ansaldo STS systems will be built around SCADE Suite.