II/1/2/10 MiTraS: Metropolitan Transport System

Synopsis

With increased congestion of large and super-large cities grows the market for software solutions to the problems facing metropolitan passenger transport. There is now a catalogue of products to choose from, even a technology to put them together, as no single solution is likely to work here. But the true integration requires products to have the same understanding of the basic concepts in the domain, not only formats of data, and often goes beyond customising off-shelf packages. In this project we intend to show how formal methods can help produce such integrated solutions in the domain of metropolitan transport.

Period

September 1996 - June 1997

Partners

1. UNU/IIST

2. Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radio-electronic

Aims and Objectives

We proceed in three stages:

• This stage aims to produce an ontology of the basic concepts describing metropolitan on-route transport. Such concepts include street network, transport vehicles, traffic, traffic regulations, transport stops, transport routes, timetables ..., all captured in the formal model written in RSL.

• The ontology will apply here to formally capture requirements for software which can solve a number of problems in this domain, under the common goal to maintain (as much as possible) passenger timetables despite some unpredictable events in the streets. This includes the issues like positioning of vehicles, detection of vehicle timetable violations, finding detours for congested street sections etc..

• Fulfilling this high-level goal calls for the integrated application of software specified in the stage (2). We show how this can be done, based solely on the specification of software, not their implementation (generally more complex). The crucial point is that all requirements for the component software share the understanding (expressed formally) of the basic concepts characterising their common domain.

Achievements

One report completed, one in progress.