Siemens Switzerland Selects AdaCore Toolset for Railway Project

NEW YORK & PARIS & ZURICH--(BUSINESS WIRE)--AdaCore, a leading supplier of Ada development tools and support services, today announced that the Mobility Division of Siemens Switzerland Ltd., has selected GNAT Pro, along with the CodePeer static analysis tool, to develop the next generation of its railway control and information system. The contract with AdaCore provides Siemens software developers with state-of-the-art Ada tools and direct access to the world’s largest team of Ada experts, many of whom have years of experience in safety-critical application development.

The Siemens railway control system is a modern networked application that covers every aspect of the railway control domain. It uses a distributed architecture to allow a computer to automatically take over control of a cell from another computer in the same cell due to a hardware failure or planned maintenance. This architecture guarantees high-availability of the system in accordance with European railway software standards. The current version of the system controls the train traffic throughout major parts of Switzerland and also parts of Austria, Hungary and Malaysia.

“Safety has the highest priority in the railway business. Therefore, we invest a lot of time and energy in code-review and testing activities. Recently, Siemens is experiencing a renaissance in demand for its railway control software, which is placing a heavy load on our software development resources. In order to meet the demand, without compromising safety or quality, we recognized the need for tools that would allow us to work more efficiently. Our two most important requirements were an Ada compiler that could be configured to analyze code against a rigorous set of specific criteria, and an automated code review and validation tool to identify potential runtime errors. Now, with detailed feedback from the GNAT compiler and CodePeer we are able to discover problems at the source instead of in the test lab and the code-review process is now essentially automated,” said Daniel Bigelow, Siemens software developer.

About AdaCore

Founded in 1994, AdaCore is the leading provider of commercial software solutions for Ada, a state-of-the-art programming language designed for large, long-lived applications where safety, security, and reliability are critical. AdaCore’s flagship product is the GNAT Pro development environment, which comes with expert on-line support and is available on more platforms than any other Ada technology. AdaCore has an extensive world-wide customer base. See http://www.adacore.com/home/company/customers for further information.

Ada and GNAT Pro see a growing usage in high-integrity and safety-certified applications, including commercial aircraft avionics, military systems, air traffic management/control, railway systems, and medical devices, and in security-sensitive domains such as financial services. The SPARK Pro toolset, available from AdaCore, is especially useful in such contexts.

AdaCore has North American headquarters in New York and European headquarters in Paris.

About Siemens

Siemens AG (Berlin and Munich) is a global powerhouse in electronics and electrical engineering, with operating sectors in industry, energy and healthcare. In fiscal 2010, revenue totaled some €76 billion with a net income of €4.1 billion. Siemens has around 405,000 employees worldwide. For information in English specific to Siemens Mobility please visit www.mobility.siemens.com/mobility/global/en/Pages/siemens-mobility.aspx.

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