Automatic Test Generation for Coverage Analysis of ERTMS Software

ERTMS is the European Railway Traffic Management System. The CENELEC EN50128 guidelines for software development of safety critical system require that the software produced is verified by providing a set of tests covering the 100% of the code. This requirement, however, substantially increases the costs associated to the testing phase, since it may involve the manual generation of tests. In this paper we present a methodology to automatic generate test achieving the desired code coverage. The automatization of the test generation phase, applied to some modules of the ERTMS developed by Ansaldo STS (an Italian leading company in the field), led to a dramatic increase in the productivity and to a reduction of the costs of the entire software development process.