A summary of the Signaling Design Automation Forum 2018

The 15th of May Prover hosted the first Signaling Design Automation Forum with attendees from all over the world.

Our intention was to gather leading signaling management peers from all over the world to discuss the latest evolutions of design automation – software technologies to automate design and verification of railway signaling systems.

We wanted to create a forum for sharing experiences and best practices, and for networking.

We are really happy by the interest and the engagement shown during the conference. The interest exceeded our expectations. We had attendees from leading infrastructure managers, suppliers and engineering firms from all over the world.

What happened during SDAF 2018?

During the day several interesting presentations were held, and we ran workshop sessions covering some key issues on formal methods and design automation in between presentations blocks

Arne Borälv from Prover started the day off with giving an overview of the latest evolutions in design automation and formal methods. Afterwards, Jesper Carlström and Daniel Fredholm from Prover held a presentation about Prover’s approach to Signaling Design Automation.

David Bonvoisin from RATP spoke about 30 years of formal verification, showing how RATP works with and uses formal methods. Julien Ordioni, also from RATP, provided an interesting session about RATP´s interlocking strategy, introducing the new relay based PHPI interlocking systems and formal proofs.

Peter Duggan from Siemens held a session about introducing mathematical verification techniques to railway interlockings in order efficiently prove safety. Peter ´s presentation lay out the drivers for change to automotated sign-off verification and automated development.

Andreas Mårtensson from SL shared experiences of using a full design automation process, including auto generated software for interlocking on Roslagsbanan.

Sofia Georgiadis and William Parrella from NYCT, shared NYCT benefits of using Prover iLock for interlocking safety verification at New York City Subway.

Mohammed Tokunboh and Pierre Nicolleau from Ansaldo STS spoke about experiences of using formal methods and formal verification for safety verification of CBTC and ERTMS subsystems.

The main part of the afternoon was spent in workshop sessions discussion experiences of working with formal methods and design automation, benefits and challenges and how to overcome these challenges. This workshop, as well as the survey before SDA Forum, will result in a report that we will publish.

Stockholm offered fantastic weather all day and after a very rewarding day of sessions, a networking session on the rooftop bar and dinner closed off the conference.

SDAF 2019

We at Prover are very grateful to all attendees and speakers for joining us and making this day a truly inspiring and rewarding day. Given the success and the interest for the event, we plan to host this next year as well! We will keep you posted!

Yours sincerely,
Anders Lindén