Rule-Based Incremental Verification Tools Applied to Railway Designs and Regulations

When designing railway infrastructure (tracks, signalling systems, etc.), railway engineers need to keep in mind numerous regulations for ensuring safety. Many of these regulations are simple, but demonstrably conforming with them often involves tedious manual work. We have worked on automating the verification of regulations against CAD designs, and integrated a verification tool and methodology into the tool chain of railway engineers. Automatically generating a model from the railway designs and running the verification tool on it is a valuable step forward, compared to manually reviewing the design for compliance and consistency. To seamlessly integrate the consistency checking into the CAD work-flow of the design engineers, however, requires a fast, on-the-fly mechanism, similar to real-time compilation done in standard programming tools.