We present a typed translation of XML data to the B method, to enable processing data in a principled and safe fashion. Indeed, data validation for railways is a success story of formal methods in general and B and ProB in particular. Data formats range from custom Excel to the railML standard, with many data sources being in XML.
The new typed translation has been integrated into the ProB toolset, and enables automated import of XML data in B machines. We implemented various features and performance improvements in ProB, notably to process large XML files. We evaluated our approach on an industrial railway design case study
from Deutsche Bahn. We compare the performance with existing tooling based on the XML-specific Schematron framework. The ProB based solution offers similar performance, and adds new features like visualisation of rule violations.