Systematic Verification and Acceptance of Requirements (SVAR)

Research pitch

Faster realization of infrastructure projects benefits both business and society. Sweden needs better infrastructure to accelerate the green transformation and build resource-efficient solutions to the most pressing societal problems. Our project focuses on helping suppliers verify deliverables against client requirements like those from Trafikverket. This reduces project costs by detecting issues during design rather than post-construction.

A more detailed explanation

Background: Trafikverket is responsible for planning, ordering and accepting deliverables from suppliers and maintaining Sweden’s infrastructure. As a client organization, in the planning phase, they have the responsibility to communicate requirements to suppliers and set the acceptance criteria for the delivered assets, such as design documents.

Problem: The verification of deliverables is the responsibility of suppliers. However, due to the large number of regulatory requirements and the extent of the deliverables, a complete verification is often impossible. The supplier has no objective means to show that all requirements are fulfilled, which increases Trafikverket’s workload when accepting deliverables.

Objectives: Following the results of the previous project (DCAT – 2020-2022), we investigate means to automate compliance checks (ACC) of digital assets. First, we develop a maturity model to assess Trafikverket’s capabilities to implement ACC. Second, we analyze Trafikverkets regulatory requirements w.r.t. their verifiability (in DCAT, we analyzed a sample of requirements and found that not all are objectively verifiable). Third, we develop a verification method library, based on the analysis of verifiable requirements. In project DCAT, we identified a set of seven archetypical verification types that we intend to validate with the analysis of a larger sample of requirements.

Method: The project will be executed in collaboration with HOCHTIEF ViCon who have expertise in the construction domain and complement the PI’s expertise in requirements engineering, verification and natural language processing. We follow a Design Science approach involving HOCHTIEF ViCon as a potential user of ACC and Trafikverket as the client who accepts digital assets verified with ACC.

Contribution: The results of the project have the potential to contribute to a more efficient verification process at suppliers. Even though we foresee that only a fraction of requirements can be automatically verified, this reduction in workload allows engineers to focus on technically difficult requirements. Acceptance testing can then also focus on aspects that are not automatically verifiable, thereby reducing the workload at Trafikverket and increasing confidence in the deliverable. As a result of widely adopted ACC, Trafikverket projects could see a reduction in cost and lead time, benefiting citizens paying for and using infrastructure.

IVA-100

SVAR has been selected to be included in the yearly IVA-100 list of current research with potential to create value, curated by the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.

We have established a reference group at Trafikverket, to which we report results and ask for feedback to adjust research directions. Reference group meetings are held every three months.

• Kickoff meeting (2023-11-06)
• Reference group meeting I (2024-01-17)
• Reference group meeting II (2024-04-18)
• Reference group meeting III (2024-06-18)
• Reference group meeting IV (2024-10-11)

Objective 1

Develop the Automated Compliance Checking Capability Maturity Model (ACC-CMM) that can be used to assess to what degree the project environment at Trafikverket supports ACC.

Work Package 1 – Prepare ACC-CMM development

Review literature on the empirical development of maturity models and grids and design a method for ACC-CMM development. Since we base the development of ACC-CMM on the capabilities identified by Beach et el., we must investigate how this affects the methodological soundness and validity of the maturity model development. In addition, we collect requirements from the potential users of the model to ensure its fitness for purpose.

Work Package 2 – ACC-CMM development

Design ACC-CMM based on the findings from Work Package 1 and develop an assessment instrument that can be used to direct projects as well as suppliers in terms of their efforts of improving automated compliance checking.

Work Package 3 – ACC-CMM application

Apply ACC-CMM in the context of a particular project type of Trafikverket (for example, rail or road projects, investment or large projects), together with an analysis of ongoing research projects, to establish a baseline capability for automated compliance checking of the organization.

Objective 2

Understand to what degree the compliance checking of requirements (TDOK/TRVInfra, project- and system-specific) is automatable.

Work Package 4 – Requirements’ verifiability

Apply the clustering approach suggested by Zhang and El-Gohary to analyse Trafikverket’s regulatory requirements (TRVInfra) w.r.t. their verifiability to understand the potential for automated compliance checking.

Work Package 5 – Requirements’ verifiability analysis procedure

Package the analysis procedure employed in WP04 such that Trafikverket, as well as the scientific community, can reapply it on requirements collections beyond TRVInfra.

Work Package 6 – Assessment of TRVInfra requirements w.r.t. machine readability

Review the literature on the development of machine-readable standards and provide an analysis for the feasibility of representing the verifiable requirements identified in Work Package 4 in a machine-readable format.

Objective 3

Develop procedures for automated, reusable, verification of requirements.

Work Package 7 – Demonstration of verification methods of models

Transfer of the theoretical approaches into an Information Delivery Manual (IDM) to provide overview about all exchange information requirements. To enable automated verification, Information Delivery Specifications (IDS) will be developed. For verification purposes, demonstrators for different requirements will be set up to validate the degree of possible automatization.

Work Package 8 – Evaluation of verification methods

To verify that the developed verification methods are according to the needs of the stakeholders, an evaluation concept should be developed. The evaluation concept will cover the main aspects to implement new technologies (e.g. people, technology, processes and policies). Feedback from stakeholders involved will be gathered, evaluated and used to define a roadmap to optimize the handling of the verification methods and provide them
as open standard.

Work Package 9 – Roadmap and recommendations for implementation

To create a starting point for developing a verification library, which enables stakeholders to verify different kinds of requirements, several examples of optimized verification checks will be combined. Guidelines as well as templates will be elaborated on how to define a suitable Information Delivery Manual, how to derive the Information Delivery Specification and how to create verification methods.

Blekinge Institute of Technology

Michael Unterkalmsteiner (Project leader and contact)

Krzysztof Wnuk

HOCHTIEF ViCon

Jan-Derrick Braun

Jessica Steinjan

Marcus Rowsell

Trafikverket

Göran Samuelsson

Pia Schönbeck

Martin P. Lundberg

Rastkar Rauf