ABSTRACT
For a company to be competitive in the market, following technologies and being updated with new trends and practices, is essential. In safety-critical domains, the introduction of new practices and methodologies is slower than in other engineering fields, since safety standards and long established practices tend to defer the adoption of new emerging technologies, until assessments and time reveal them mature and safe. Slow introduction of new methods is especially characterizing the railway domain, where the lifespan of products could easily reach decades or even a century. Now it is long time that Model-Driven Engineering techniques and tools have been proposed, but their maturity – especially for safety-critical systems – is still debated. As for most engineering branches, advances in software engineering have always resulted from increases in the level of abstraction.
