University of Twente Student Theses
Bepalen van de meerwaarde van use cases voor het in kaart brengen van onderhoudseisen bij ProRail
Prinsen, Joren (2016) Bepalen van de meerwaarde van use cases voor het in kaart brengen van onderhoudseisen bij ProRail.
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| Abstract: | ProRail is a government task organisation that is responsible for the maintenance of the railway network. The operation and maintenance of a railway network is complex, it is regulated by government legislation and has to work closely with all stakeholders in order to be successful.ProRail choose to outsource their maintenance activities and therefore need to facilitate a good accessibility.That is why ProRail needs to compose the maintenance requirements and to do that they need to know how the process contractor executes the maintenance.The method of maintenance is barely documented within ProRail and that makes it impossible to compose good maintenance requirements. In this research, it is researched whether use cases provide benefit to compile the maintenance requirements, in this research is chosen to elaborate the recovering of a failure in the rail track. Based on the issue it is possible to drawn the main question. Main question: To what extent have use cases for ProRail added value to compose maintenance requirements for the repair of a malfunction? Use cases describe the system´s behaviour under various conditions. Actors initiate actions with the system to accomplish some goal. The use cases are functionally specified this means they are listed in combination with a verb for example “Restore malfunction”.The use cases itself are often applied in the ICT branch in order to map the client requirements and to be sure to the created product are close to the desired product. The use cases give a visual display of a sequence of actions started by different actors. Every use case comes with a systems border which aims to delimit the specific use case. This makes it possible to create multiple use cases which follow each other. In a use case often multiple actors are involved, for example in de use case “Restore malfunction” the contractor and ProRail are involved. In order to research whether the use cases have added value to compose maintenance requirements a use case will be developed and using them to check if the use cases have added value. For this research, the use case “Restore malfunction” has been elaborated because a malfunction within a rail track is difficult to reach because the trains continue to drive. The use case is developed by using the iterative design method, whereby the use case keeps being adjusted through new information. The information is collected by executing interviews with colleagues inside ProRail from different departments as well with the four process contractors who were interviewed about specific cases (Amsterdam Centraal, Utrecht Centraal, Nijmegen and Breda). The next step is to create design requirements for the use cases, the requirements are based on the literature about use cases and the wishes from ProRail. The use case needs to meet the design requirements in order to be an added value. Eventually by means of a verification and validation process, it is demonstrated that use cases have an added value by composing maintenance requirements. The validation process was executed with six end-users inside ProRail who use the composed use case and giving their opinion about the use cases by answering some questions and mark them. In addition, they are asked what needed to be improved to make the use cases successful. In the end, it can be concluded that the use cases provide added value. The end-users stated that the use case give a visual display of the maintenance, this visual display is easier to understand for other departments and makes the maintenance requirements more usable. The use cases can be used as a communication tool between the different departments inside ProRail cause of this visual display. By presenting the maintenance requirements on such a way the end-user can easily trace the underpinning of a specific requirement and use them to make decisions. The use cases can lead to a maintenance friendly railway network that will result in shorter failure times caused by a better accessibility. In addition, the use cases can be used to compose new maintenance requirements. Also by mapping the maintenance per location, the needed maintenance facilities are determined. By using the use cases for this and by performing this multiple times, many standard maintenance requirements are generated. The use cases will provide added value when they are completely worked out, this means that they have to include the important / common maintenance activities and every maintenance requirement needs to be underpinned. Much time has to be invested in the further development of the use cases. Following the conclusions and the recommendations from the validation process, a number of recommendations can be drawn. The use cases to be further developed and this should involve various stakeholders (engineering and process contractors). It should also be determined where in the process the use cases are used. ProRail also need to think about how they want to manage the use cases and how much capacity they want to reserve. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Master) |
| Faculty: | ET: Engineering Technology |
| Subject: | 56 civil engineering |
| Programme: | Construction Management and Engineering MSc (60337) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/70586 |
| Export this item as: | BibTeX EndNote HTML Citation Reference Manager |
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