Decision support at the wheel—rail interface: The development of system functional requirements

Abstract

Railway decision support systems (DSSs) tend to address track and vehicle assets separately. This paper describes the development of a comprehensive set of high-level functional requirements for an integrated support system that optimizes the system as a whole. Interviews and workshops were held with key industry stakeholders covering regulation, infrastructure, condition monitoring, mass transit, and light rail to elicit their issues, needs, and desires. The needs were checked for relevance, duplication, and overlapping; and rephrased, decomposed, grouped, classified, and prioritized in order to achieve a consistent, complete, and unambiguous set of system stakeholder requirements. They were then used to derive a set of high-level system functional requirements for the DSS. The paper also demonstrates the importance of complete traceability between the two sets of requirements.