The Yellow Book Steering Group

Since August 98, the Yellow Book Steering Group has supervised the development of the Yellow Book itself and associated material including training courses and the Yellow book web site.

We have committed ourselves to acting on behalf of the UK railway industry and its customers as a whole. We welcome input from Yellow Book users and take it into account when setting the strategy for developing the Yellow Book.

The Yellow Book has a suggestion form at the back. 18 suggestions have been logged so far, for which we are grateful. We have rejected one, but only because it was outside the Yellow Book scope. The remainder are generally suggesting localised corrections or clarifications and will be taken into account at the next routine update.

There is also a User Group which meets approximately annually to allow users to exchange views and experiences with us and with each other. The last User Group, YBUG4, took place on 10th July 2001.

This short paper is intended to feed back to Yellow Book users, the views which came across to us at YBUG4 and elsewhere and our current plans for responding to them.

Feedback from industry

At YBUG4, Rod Muttram, the then chairman of the Steering Group, suggested to the User Group that:

• the Yellow Book should focus more European issues; and
• a period of stability and review is now needed and the focus should be on supplementing YB3 rather than reissuing it.

The feedback suggested that these views were supported. The comments made from the floor included:

• a request for increased guidance on best practice and engineering judgement, especially with regard to cross acceptance;
• the suggestion that addressing systems and system level issues was an important next step;
• a proposal to integrate human factors better into the Yellow Book; and
• a request for better recognition of the affects and influence that the civil engineering discipline has on the infrastructure, safety and operation of the railway.

There were some further useful but more localised suggestions.

Our response

We considered this feedback and proposes the following broad strategy in response:

• It is still too early to make plans to issue YB4.
• A correction sheet should be published in paper and on the web site to inform users of errors in YB3.
• A series of brief application notes should be published on the web site to provide supplementary guidance.
• Additional training should be considered in the topics of application notes.

We considered the areas in which requests had been made for additional guidance and decided initially to tackle two "threads" of work, that is general areas to tackle: Human Factor and Systems. Within each thread, we identified a number of topics, each of which might usefully be the topic of an application note. From these we selected three topics to address first. The threads and topics are listed below and the three topics to address first are shown in bold.

THREAD 1: HUMAN FACTORS	THREAD 2: SYSTEMS
1.1: Assessing the risk of and arising from human error	2.1: Systems issues
1.2: Managing the effect of change on people	2.2: Software and EN 50128
1.3: Integrating multiple systems that interface with the same person	2.3: COTS
	2.4: Cross acceptance

Continuing the dialogue

This paper is intended as part of a continuing dialogue. You are welcome to comment. Please send comments to the Steering Group secretary