An HCPN Pattern for Railway Safety Critical Scenarios Formal Modeling

Analyzing railway critical scenarios usually involves a large team of diverse railway abilities and skills. This paper presents a formal modeling pattern for Hierarchical Colored Petri Nets (HCPN) in modeling railway safety critical scenarios. Indeed, under the French project called “PERFECT”, our long-term objective is to formalize and automate a significant part of railway scenarios modeling. The purpose of this contribution is to bring a first proposition of a standardized modeling way able to deal with the models complexity resulting from the various modeling capabilities for railway scenarios. In fact, HCPN modeling freedom is preventing from accurate information aggregation and a beneficial use of those models in an overall safety analysis. The proposed pattern is based on modular High Level Petri Nets and consists in describing all the railway scenario episodes while incorporating most relevant safety components of the system, such as safety regulation procedures, interlocking and even human involvement, enabling a larger gathering of information and allowing the study of diverse issues in a same global model. This work intends to bring a concrete and reusable HCPN pattern for modeling in order to facilitate studies of accidental scenarios considering automatic mechanisms and human tasks. A concrete application of the pattern was made for the real accidental scenario of “Saint Romain en Gier”.