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Railway switching control systems, like digital flight control systems, are safety critical systems.
Their Advanced Technology Group, lead by Dr. Joseph Profeta, has applied formal methods in past efforts and turned to NASA for expertise in integrating these techniques into their next generation products. The result of this first years work was a formal mathematical model of a railway switching network, defined in two levels. The second level is a formalization of the standard scheme used in railroad control, the block model control system. The European formal methods community has addressed safety properties of certain components of railroad control systems, but the work there has typically been at lower level. Hoover, D. N. A Mathematical Model for Railway Control Systems .