A multipurpose generic framework for developing systematic railway operational rules

Typically, railways have developed over time. When new technical system became available, they were adapted and integrated into the existing system. Usually, this led also to adapted or changed operational rules. However, there was never a structured and systematic approach in the development of operational rules, at least not in Germany. It is very difficult to get a comprehensive overview of today’s rules and also to estimate and compare the effect of significant changes. One of these concrete significant changes is the necessity to hardening railway operations against possible IT security threats in modern railway IT systems. We realized that, in order to have an approach which can evaluate, adapt, develop, trace and manage the operational rules systematically, a new multipurpose generic framework will be needed. In this paper, we focus on introducing a multipurpose generic framework and its usage for developing systematic railway operational rules. The work in this paper is part of our ongoing research project SysRULES (2017-2019), which is funded by the Karl Vossloh-Stiftung in Germany.