The EU is funding the development of methods and tools for formal modelling, verification and validation "which will make it possible to produce precise models for embedded systems and help eliminate design errors before projects go into the manufacturing stage", said the University of Southampton.
These tools will be applied to automated railway signalling and smart energy distribution by industrial partners in the project.
Running for 30 months the project is called ADVANCE (Advanced Design and Verification Environment for Cyber-physical System Engineering).
Professor Michael Butler of Southampton is lead researcher in the project, which also includes Alstom Transport, Critical Software Technologies, Systerel and Düsseldorf University.
"Critical infrastructure, such as railways and energy distribution, rely on large complex software systems and software design errors are expensive to fix and can have a detrimental impact", said Butler. "We are producing formal modelling and verification tools so that system designs can be tested earlier and improvements made before any commitment is made to the final design," said Professor Butler.
The consortium will use an open-source software toolkit called Rodin which was initially developed in the EU Rigorous Open Development Environment for Complex Systems project (RODIN, 2004-2007) and methods from the EU Industrial Deployment of System Engineering Methods Providing High Dependability and Productivity (DEPLOY, 2008-2012).
"Formal methods improve the quality of the analysis phase by forcing the systems engineer to analyse a broader space of problems," said Jose Reis, principal consultant engineer at Critical Software Technologies.