The CLEARSY Safety Platform: 5 Years of Research, Development and Deployment

TL;DR

The CLEARSY Safety Platform (CSSP) integrates hardware and formal methods to simplify development and certification of safety-critical systems, demonstrated through 5 years of railway applications and potential for broader domains.

Contribution

This paper presents a SIL4-ready safety platform combining hardware and formal methods, with insights from 5 years of railway deployment and plans for future integration with domain-specific languages.

Findings

Effective application in railway safety systems

Reduced development and certification costs

Potential for adaptation to other safety-critical domains

Abstract

The CLEARSY Safety Platform (CSSP) was designed to ease the development of safety critical systems and to reduce the overall costs (development, deployment, and certification) under the pressure of the worldwide market. A smart combination of hardware features (double processor) and formal method (B method and code generators) was used to produce a SIL4-ready platform where safety principles are built-in and cannot be altered by the developer. Summarizing a 5-year return of experience in the effective application in the railways, this article explains how this approach is a game-changer and tries to anticipate the future of this platform for safety critical systems. In particular, the education of future engineers and the seamless integration in existing engineering processes with the support of Domain Specific Languages are key topics for a successful deployment in other domains. DSL like Robosim to program mobile robots and relay circuits to design railway signalling systems are connected to the platform.