REMAIN aimed to develop practical methods and tools for the evaluation of a Reliability, Availability and Maintainability System (RAMS) for railway operations. The main objectives of REMAIN have been to:

• define requirements for railway components crucial for the safety and efficiency of rail transport on a European basis, focusing on infrastructure aspects of maintenance costs;
• develop a framework for the collection and the retrieval of status-indicative information on these components in a comprehensive modular database;
  specify and develop modules for railway-specific communication and diagnostic methods, with the aim of gathering top-level status information on crucial components;
• use up-to-date information in combination with historical data for the strategic planning of maintenance operations;
• design a modular and open system architecture for user-friendly adjustment of the maintenance system for particular European railway systems;
• provide a demonstrator incorporating diagnostic features for infrastructure and to use it as a test bed for validation of the applicability of the specified methods;
• establish application groups, drawn from international organisations and industry, with the aim of exploiting the study's results.