Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
smart investment for railway operators and manufacturers alike, by simply
reducing their future upgrade and maintenance costs significantly.
Rather than starting to develop a new open source software package from
scratch, the easiest and fastest way for a user to reach that goal would be
simply by selecting one of the already existing and (as far as possible) ser-
vice proven products from the market and put it under an appropriate open
source license. There are numerous examples from the IT sector, such as
the software development tool “Eclipse”, the successor to IBM's “Visual Age
for Java 4.0.”, source code was released in 2001 [28], the Internet browser
“Mozilla FireFox” (former: Netscape Navigator), and oce communication
software “Open Oce” (former: StarOce) and many more.
3.3
Tools and Documents Need to be Included
In the long term it will not be enough only to make the software in the on-
board equipment open. Tools for specification, modeling and simulation as
well as software development, testing and documentation are also essential
for securing quality and lowering life cycle cost. To meet the request for more
competition in the after sales software service business and avoiding vendor
lock-in effects, requires third parties to be in a position to maintain software,
prepare safety case documents, and get the modified software authorized
again without depending on proprietary information. A request no one would
seriously deny for other safety critical elements e.g. in the mechanical parts
section of a railway vehicle, like loadbearing car body parts or wheel discs.
The past has shown that software tools are becoming obsolete quite often
due to new releases, changing of operating systems, or tool suppliers simply
going out of business, leaving customers alone with little or no support for
their proprietary products. Railway vehicles are often in revenue service for
more than 40 years and electronic equipment is expected to be serviced for
at least 20 years and tools need to be up to the required technical level for
the whole period.
The aircraft industry with similar or sometimes even longer product life-
cycles has realizing this decades ago, starting with ADA compiler in the
1980th, specifically designed for developing high assurance software for em-
bedded control design projects, originally initiated by the US Air Force and
developed by the New York University (GNAT: GNU NYU Ada Translator),
which is available in the “public domain” and further developed by AdaCore
and the GNU Project [3], [23] and a somewhat more sophisticated tools chain,
which is called TOPCASED, initiated by AIRBUS Industries [29].
TOPCASED represents a tools set, based on ECLIPSE (another OSS
software development tools platform [28]) for safety critical flight control ap-
plications with the objective to cover the whole life cycle of such software
products, including formal specification, modeling, software generation, ver-
ification and validation, based on FLOSS in order to guarantee long term
availability.
