Abstract:
Efficient and safe transportation systems are essential part of modern society and developed cities. Logistics and communications play a vital role in the economy of any country. Rail transport systems are considered as backbone for freight and passenger movement across long distances. Developing a secure rail transportation system for a developing country like Pakistan is a challenging task due to weak infrastructure and less public awareness. A secure transport system can reduce chances of collision and result in saving human lives and economy.
Formal modeling of a framework or a system can assist us with checking unwavering quality, precision and consistency of the framework or system. It helps us to check the validity and authenticity of the system before the actual product comes in hand. System can be viewed from different aspects through formal specification for better understanding. Modifications in the model at design level is also possible if there are any flaws in our formal model.
Railway transportation systems are safety, monetary and environmentally critical systems since its failure may cause serious outcomes, for example, loss of human life, extreme wounds, and huge size of natural harms or extensive financial disasters. Rail transport is a distributed system consist of many concurrent process occurring in parallel fashion. So the safety and heterogeneous nature of this framework requires formal modeling for its development and advancement. The fundamental focus of this study is to build up a moving block railway operation system with dispatching segments to keep away trains from crashes and wrecking. Formal modeling and analysis of the operation system will also be performed to check the consistency and reliability.
A core technique for the proposed research work would be the colored Petri nets (CPNs) based on discrete and concurrent system modeling, which will be used for simulation and verification of the operation model of system. CPN is the third class of Petri nets and it is a combination of Petri Nets and Standard Meta Language (SML). After model simulation, a series of analysis checks will make sure the authenticity and consistency of the model.
