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1Introduction
In this chapter, the objectives of this dissertation are introduced. Furthermore, its main
contributions are emphasised and explained in detail. Afterwards, the delimitation from already
existing, related work is introduced. This chapter terminates with a summary about the
structure of this document.
1.1. Objectives
This dissertation investigates the potential of model-based design and verification and validation
of safety-critical control systems in presence of re-usable open source software. Railway control
systems are used here as application domain, specifically the European Train Control System
(ETCS) [23]. This topic is highly relevant from an industrial and also from a research perspective
because manufacturers of complex safety-critical control systems, especially in the avionic and
in the railway domains, currently perform a change of strategy regarding the development of
software core components.
In the past, this was completely under responsibility of the supplier of the embedded
controller. Since system integrators, like German Railways, always use several suppliers for each
component in order to avoid single-source situations, this led to similar software components
being redundantly developed by different suppliers and resulted in costs that were no longer
acceptable. As a consequence, today’s strategy is to manage a “pool” of core algorithms for
crucial control algorithms to be re-used by every supplier on its proprietary hardware platform.
There is already a general consent that this pool should not just consist of software code
but instead of system (component) models, so that platform-specific code can be generated
following the model-based development paradigm by extending, specializing, instantiating, and
transforming these models. This new strategy leads to a number of interesting challenges for
research activities in the fields of system modelling, operating systems, and embedded systems
verification and are analysed in the context of this dissertation project.
The overall research process of this dissertation is graphically summarised in Figure 1.1,
which shows the interconnection of the main research objectives. It should be noted that the
order in the research process does not correspond directly to the order of topics or rather
chapters in this document, which additionally will be explained in Section 1.4.
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