A summary of the Signaling Design Automation Forum 2019

November 6 Prover hosted Signaling Design Automation Forum 2019 in Shanghai.

Our intention was to gather signaling professionals from the railway industry as well as related safety critical industries to share and discuss the latest evolutions on design automation – software technologies to automate design and verification of railway signaling systems. Especially focusing on Safety Assurance by Formal Verification.

We wanted to create a forum for sharing experiences and best practices, and for networking. We are happy and honoured by the interest and the engagement shown during the conference. The conference was fully booked and the day was filled with a multitude of engaged discussions.

What happened during SDAF 2019?

During the day several interesting presentations were held and at the end of the day we carried out an on-line survey on key issues covering formal verification and design automation.

Daniel Fredholm, Technical Director China for Prover, started off the day laying the ground of Safety Assurance by Formal Verification. What it is, how to perform Formal Verification and why it is the only verification method that gives you 100% coverage on safety.

Fei Niu, presented Prover´s solutions Prover iLock and Prover Certifier, used for Formal Verification and Design Automation, including a comprehensive demonstration.

This was followed by some global case studies on use of Formal Verification and Design Automation:

• Experiences made by Stockholm Metro (SL) on using a complete design automation process for signaling was presented.
• New York City Transit´s use of Formal Verification, being mandatory in New York for all new computerized interlockings was described.
• At Paris Metro (RATP) formal verification has been mandatory and used for many years as the means to achieve Safety Assurance.

As a pioneer in the Chinese market adopting Formal Verification, CASCO Signal presented their ongoing work on Formal Verification as well as their plans on Design Automation.

ANSYS shared their solutions for safety critical software in Rail Transportation as well as their Design Verifier which is powered by Prover Technology.

Certifer, a major ISA in the railway industry shared their view of safety assurance work including the use of Formal Verification.

We ended the day with an online survey covering key topics within Safety Assurance and Formal Verification.

Shanghai offered us nice weather and after a rewarding day of presentations, discussions and networking we had dinner at nearby Le Bec & Charles. We at Prover are very grateful to all attendees and speakers for joining us and making this day a truly inspiring and rewarding day!