A method to model guidelines for developing railway safety-critical systems with UML

There are today an abundance of standards concerned with the development and certification of railway safety-critical systems. They recommend the use of different techniques to describe system requirements and to pursue safety strategies. One problem shared by standards is that they only prescribe what should be done or use but they provide no guidance on how recommendations can be fulfilled. The purpose of this paper is to investigate a methodology to model guidelines for building certifiable UML models that cater for the needs and recommendations of railway standards. The paper will explore some of the major tasks that are typical of development guidelines and will illustrate practical steps for achieving these tasks.