Automated Testing in Railways: Leveraging Robotic Arm Precision and Efficiency for Superior Customizability and Usability Test Case Execution

In the context of software testing of SIL4 railway onboard signalling application, this study aims to investigate the benefits of using a testing environment composed of a robotic arm, supported by other tools, for the creation and execution of test cases. Starting from the application context of railway signalling, a brief introduction of the European Railway Traffic Management System is provided, describing the approaches and methodologies used by the V&V team of Hitachi Rail STS in using such environment for the validation of a SIL4 software based on a 2oo2 architecture, whose GUI is the Driver Machine Interface. Furthermore, the contribute of Visual Inspection DMI Robotic Arm (VIDRA) tool in the verification and validation process is presented. In order to collect data on the benefits brought by the robotic testing environment, a survey was conducted by interviewing colleagues from V&V department, asking them questions about the ease of use of the environment, the learning curve after one month of use, how much their productivity improved, together with personal considerations. The results show that regardless of the seniority and experience of the interviewed staff, the evaluations on both the ease of use and the learning curve are mostly positive, while productivity is the parameter that received extremely positive evaluations. The personal considerations have shown encouraging comments with propositive insights aimed to enrich the environment with innovative features. These results suggested that the testing environment can be further improved thus possible future developments are described in conclusion.