Research And Application Of The Safety-related Software Design Method

The software has been more and more applied to all aspects of our daily lives, including aerospace systems, rail transportation systems, medical information systems, communication systems and so on. In these areas, the safety of the software is very critical, especially when the software failure will result in disaster or accident which can cause life-threatening or substantial property damage. Based on advantages and disadvantages of the existing methods in the safety-critical area, the Automatic Train Protection (ATP) software system is taken as an example in this paper to study the model-driven approach to automatic code generation method which is aimed at improving the safety of the software. The work mainly reflects in the following aspects:Firstly, we comprehensively analyze the software development methods in safety-related fields based on the current situation of the software development. According to the shortage of the existing development methods and challenges faced in the ATP system development, we propose to use model-driven and automatic generation method for ATP software development.Secondly, based on the analysis of the functions and interface characteristics, we design the data structure model elements, which is also the focus of this paper. This study establish interface models, architecture model and function models for the ATP system. The function models are implemented by the data flow or state machine model, which describes the input and output variables of function unit and its internal details.Finally, the ATP automatic code generation aided platform is designed and realized. The graphical user interface of the platform can achieve the establishment of the system model, and generate the XML model description files; XSLT technology is employed to design the specific code format template files, and then the target code automatically generated based on these files. Through the research, we concluded as follows:the model-driven development approach makes developers more concentrate on the accuracy of the model rather than the code, which avoids the manual code writing to maintain consistency between the design and code; the code update becomes more efficient and convenient in this automatic way, which improves both the software quality and development efficiency.