Traceability in Systems Engineering: An Avionics Case Study

In Systems Engineering (SE), development of complex systems involves a collaboration of expertise from different domains. Heterogeneous artifacts are generated using different modeling tools. Capturing the traceability information among these artifacts helps serve many purposes, including change impact analysis; validation and verification; and requirements tracking. However, creating trace links among these heterogeneous artifacts is problematic. No precise semantics exist for the trace links that relate them. This paper shows how to capture traceability information in a system with heterogeneous artifacts, illustrated here using an avionics case study that uses a traceability model and a trace links taxonomy that we constructed and published previously.