Formal Verification of Coordination Systems' Requirements - A Case Study on the European Train Control System

Formal verification techniques of system requirements such as model-checking and theorem proving aims to show that the requirements satisfy some properties. Consequently, their success depends on the quality of the properties formulation. We propose an approach to verify requirements of coordination systems by generating automatically the properties to be verified from the requirements themselves. The requirement specifications of a system are provided at two different levels. The coordination specification gives a global overview of the system, in terms of the different roles participating to it, with their goals and needs and with their mutual dependencies and expectations. The process specification shows how a local participant of the system performs its activities. We exploit model checking techniques for verifying the process requirements against the properties generated by the coordination requirements. In addition to provide a theoretical framework, we show how to apply this methodology on the verification of the System Requirement Specification of the European Train Control System. It is complemented with a toolchain.