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On structuring formal, semi-formal and informal data to support traceability in systems engineering environments

Published: 13 November 2004 Publication History

Abstract

The development of large, complex systems poses a number of challenges for systems engineers, not least of which is the ability to ensure user requirements have been satisfied. Effective requirements management - an amalgam of information capture, information <i>storage</i> and <i>management</i>, and information <i>dissemination</i> activities - is crucial in that respect. In this paper we concentrate on one of the core issues of <i>information management</i> in a requirements management context - namely <i>traceability</i>.
Traceability is the common term for mechanisms to record and navigate relationships between artifacts produced by development processes. However, realising effective traceability in systems engineering environments is complicated by the fact that engineers use a range of notations to describe complex systems. These range from natural language (informal), to graphical notations such as Statecharts (semi-formal) to languages with a well defined (formal) semantics such as VDM-SL and SPARK Ada. Most have tool support, although a lack of well-defined approaches to integration leads to inconsistencies and limits traceability between their respective data sets (internal models). This paper demonstrates an approach based on meta-modelling that enables traceability links to be established and consistency maintained between tools.

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  • (2007)Incremental Integration of Heterogeneous Systems Views2007 International Conference on Systems Engineering and Modeling10.1109/ICSEM.2007.373334(50-59)Online publication date: Mar-2007

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CIKM '04: Proceedings of the thirteenth ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management
    November 2004
    678 pages
    ISBN:1581138741
    DOI:10.1145/1031171
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    Published: 13 November 2004

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    1. meta-modelling
    2. systems engineering data
    3. traceability

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    • (2007)Incremental Integration of Heterogeneous Systems Views2007 International Conference on Systems Engineering and Modeling10.1109/ICSEM.2007.373334(50-59)Online publication date: Mar-2007

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