French professor wins big award

Professor Jean-Raymond Abrial was on Jan 9 awarded China's international science and technology cooperation award for his work on developing a software that is vital to the operations of Line 17, the city's only unmanned metro line that will be launched this year.

The software being used in Shanghai was jointly developed by the 78-year-old Frenchman and the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering (SCSSE) at East China Normal University.

Abrial, the only foreign scientist from Shanghai to win the award, is the creator of B-Method, a software development method that has been used to design safety-critical system applications for metro networks in more than 20 cities all over the world. B-Method was also critical to the design of Line 14 in Paris, the first unmanned line in France which was opened in 1998.

Abrial met with professor He Jifeng, head of the SCSSE, in 2005 to begin work on developing a safety-critical system that is today used in numerous metro lines in cities such as Shanghai, Wuhan and Guangzhou. All these lines have passed the strictest of safety evaluations.

"Abrial helped us to achieve a major breakthrough when such technology was being monopolized by big foreign companies," said He.

Abrial and the team from the SCSSE also played a crucial role in reducing the cost of testing and development period by 40 and 15 percent respectively. According to Jiefang Daily, Abrial could have charged for his services as a corporation but instead chose to work as an independent consultant.

Besides metro systems, B-Method has also been adopted in the verification of the electronic operation systems in automobiles. This system, upon gaining international certification, has been used in 700,000 China-produced automobiles as well as in man-made satellites such as the Chang'e 3, according to Jiefang Daily.

Abrial has been spending at least two months working in China annually for the past 12 years. In recent years, he has taught B-Method to more than 500 people in 10 renowned colleges and universities in China. He is also one of the founders of the international research center of high-confidence software under China's Ministry of Science.

zhangkun@chinadaily.com.cn