Siemens chooses AdaCore for railway control software

The Siemens railway control system is a modern networked application that covers every aspect of the railway control domain. It uses a distributed architecture to allow a computer to automatically take over control of a cell from another computer in the same cell due to a hardware failure or planned maintenance.

This architecture guarantees high-availability of the system in accordance with European railway software standards. The current version of the system controls the train traffic throughout major parts of Switzerland and also parts of Austria, Hungary and Malaysia.

“Safety has the highest priority in the railway business. Therefore, we invest a lot of time and energy in code-review and testing activities. Recently, Siemens is experiencing a renaissance in demand for its railway control software, which is placing a heavy load on our software development resources. In order to meet the demand, without compromising safety or quality, we recognized the need for tools that would allow us to work more efficiently. Our two most important requirements were an Ada compiler that could be configured to analyse code against a rigorous set of specific criteria, and an automated code review and validation tool to identify potential runtime errors. Now, with detailed feedback from the GNAT compiler and CodePeer we are able to discover problems at the source instead of in the test lab and the code-review process is now essentially automated,” said Daniel Bigelow, Siemens software developer.