The planning processes for control-command and signalling systems (CCS) are moving towards increased digitalisation. In order to support this development, syntactic (related to the formal structure) and semantic (related to the content) validation is needed, which allows the improvement of the quality of the planning data. As such, suitable data formats, which enable both of these aspects of quality vetting, are required. Flexible definitions of validation rules based on expert knowledge allow a variety of tests to be carried out.
This article presents a technique which commences with the statement of a domain-specific context in a natural language, further highlights the implementation as an XML schema or rule in the Schematron language and concludes with the preparation of validation results in user-friendly output formats such as PDF and HTML. The approach is demonstrated using the example of the “Plausibility and Admissibility Check” (PlaZ) for the PlanPro data format from DB Netz AG.