LOCOTRAC

Objectives

CETIC is in charge of a specific workpackage dedicated to software hardening. Software hardening aims at developing low cost software-based control systems providing a high degree of reliability (SIL levels) while executing on a low-assurance, low-cost hardware infrastructure.

Generally, high degree of reliability is achieved through hardware redundancy. Software hardening is an alternative approach where hardware is not reliable, but must continuously deliver credible evidence that all its computations have correctly been executed. Such evidence is elaborated by executing all software operations (arithmetic, memory, control, etc.) at least twice, using different portions of the hardware, and ensuring that the results are coherent.

The objective of CETIC is to develop an automated tool that will transform software code, by inserting such redundancy into it. This tool must by itself be reliable enough to be used in the development of high assurance systems. As such, it will follow a CENELEC-qualified development process.

Results

After a bit less than a year, CETIC has developed a set of hardening rules that will be implemented in the tool. These rules will provide the necessary evidence about the health status of hardware running critical software.

CETIC has also transposed techniques from the Deploy project to generate a risk analysis automatically, with help of constraint solver engine similar to ProB. This helped assessing the basic principles to be used in the aforementioned translation rules.

CETIC has also proposed a set of safety architectures that will guarantee that the delivered software will be reliable enough for transportation sector.

Added Value for Business

CETIC’s contribution will make it possible to mass produce low-cost high integrity systems for automated train protection applications (ATP) such as TBL1+. These systems aim at preventing train collisions by ensuring that train driver obeys the signalling rules by stopping at red lights.

The targeted market segments are the regional lines which cannot afford state of the art technology relying on costly high integrity hardware.