The railway industry is facing an increasing pressure to improve system safety, to decrease the production cost  and time to market, to reduce the carbon emission and running cost, and to improve the system capacity.  Railway systems are now being integrated into larger multi-transport networks. Such systems require an even  higher degree of automation at all levels of operation. These trends dramatically increase the complexity of railway  applications and pose new challenges in developing novel methods of modelling, analysis, verification and validation to ensure their reliability, safety and security, as well as in supporting novel mechanisms and procedures to help argue that the development processes are meeting the standards. 

The conference will contribute to a range of key objectives. There is a pressing demand to bring together researchers and developers working on railway system reliability, security and safety to discuss how these requirements can be met in an integrated way. It is also vital to ensure  that all advances in research (in both academia and industry) are driven by the real industrial needs. This will help ensure that such advances are followed by industrial deployment. Another particularly important objective is to integrate advances in research into the current development processes, and make them usable and scalable. Finally, a key goal is developing advanced methods and tools that would ensure that the systems meet the requirements imposed by the standards and help in building the arguments.

Development of complex railway systems of the future requires integrated environments and methods that support different abstraction levels and different views, including systems architecture, safety analysis, security analysis, verification tools and methods.

The conference aims to bring together researchers and engineers interested in building critical railway applications and systems. This will be a working conference in which research advances will be discussed and evaluated by both researchers and engineers focusing on their potential to be deployed in industrial settings. 

The topics of particular interest include:

    Safety in development processes and safety management
    Combined approaches to safety and security
    System and software safety analysis 
    Formal modelling and verification techniques
    System reliability
    Validation according to the standards
    Safety and security argumentation
    Fault and intrusion modelling and analysis 
    Evaluation of system capacity, energy consumption, cost and their interplay
    Tool and model integration, toolchains
    Domain-specific languages and modelling frameworks
    Model reuse for reliability, safety and security
    Modelling for maintenance strategy engineering

We are interested in the submissions of three types:

    Research papers
    Industrial experience reports
    PhD student papers

The conference submission site is https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rssrail2017.

The research papers will be no more than 16 pages long, the industrial experience reports and the PhD student papers – no more than 10 pages long. The submissions will be formatted in the Springer LNCS format (see www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0).

The conference proceedings will be published by Springer in the LNCS series.