A Framework for Auto-Programming and Testing of Railway Controllers for Varying Clients

Implementation of railway controller application logic is a highly safety-critical and time-consuming task carried out individually for each client and station by specialised signalling engineers, with corresponding high costs. Μίνθα is a software development framework designed to create code generators for application logic for the client railway companies of Ansaldo STS that use the Microlok II controller to lower the cost and increase repeatability. This chapter describes the evolution of Μίνθα from prototype to framework, and introduces the software engineering approaches of object-oriented meta-modelling and framework development along the way. It also presents known limitations and further application areas of the framework.