CoVeR maintenance and maintainability requirements by using tools

Interoperability and effective maintenance and maintainability are necessary for the European rail network, in order to obtain cost effective operation along corridors. The European rail sector is regulated through directives such as the Interoperability Directive 2008/57/EC and national regulations. In a requirement process for cross border maintainability and maintenance operations including renewal, it is important that the infrastructure managers gain an overview of all applicable regulations and are able to extract relevant requirements regarding maintainability and maintenance. Current practice is expensive due to different requirements and methods in the different countries along a corridor. As an aid to achieve an overview of all requirements, we have developed the CoVeR method (CoVeR all Requirements). The CoVeR method ensures that all the regulatory requirements are extracted, adapted and that the result from the work can be reused. As a means for implementing the CoVeR method for cross border maintainability and maintenance operations, two commercial tools have been utilized: IBM Rational DOORS and Microsoft Excel, these are referenced as “Tools” throughout the paper The main results presented within this paper are: adaptation of the CoVeR method within a new domain (maintainability and maintenance). The adapted CoVeR method is suitable as we have succeeded in making a Conformity Verification Specification (CVS) for the maintenance and maintainability requirements [17].; all the relevant requirements for 2 European Directives, 7 TSIs (Technical Specifications for Interoperability) and 4 standards that can be used for both, Suppliers (manufacturers) and Infrastructure managers are included in the requirement Tools.; established guidelines to extract and export relevant maintainability and maintenance requirements to two suitable requirements handling Tools,; an evaluation of and comparison between two popular tools used for requirement handling when using the CoVeR method. Using the Tools has improved the method by providing sorting, filtering, linking and link traceability. The tools also, especially DOORS manage different versions and changes. Further work will include analysis of empirical data from the implementation and the use of the CoVeR method. This future work will also include national regulations and exports of the CVS to other tools.