  The increasing complexity of modern interlocking poses a major challenge to
ensuring railway safety. This calls for application of formal methods
forassurance and verification of their safety. We have developed an
industry-strength toolset, called SafeCap, for formal verification of
interlockings. Our aim was to overcome the main barriers in deploying formal
methods in industry. The approach proposed verifies interlocking data developed
by signalling engineers in the ways they are designed by industry. It ensures
fully-automated verification of safety properties using the state of the art
techniques (automated theorem provers and solvers), and provides diagnostics in
terms of the notations used by engineers. In the last two years SafeCap has
been successfully used to verify 26 real-world mainline interlockings,
developed by different suppliers and design offices. SafeCap is currently used
in an advisory capacity, supplementing manual checking and testing processes by
providing an additional level of verification and enabling earlier
identification of errors. We are now developing a safety case to support its
use as an alternative to some of these activities.

Software Engineering