An Integrated Framework for Traceability and Impact Analysis in Requirements Verification of Cyber–Physical Systems

In the field of model-based design of Cyber–Physical Systems (CPS), seamless traceability of the process, from requirements to models to simulation results, is becoming increasingly important. It can be used to support several activities such as variant handling, impact analysis, component reuse, software maintenance and evolution, verification, and validation. Despite the fact that the relevance of traceability in the model-based design of CPSs is well known, current tools that support traceability management are inadequate in practice. The lack of comprehensive whole-lifecycle systems engineering support in a single tool is one of the main causes of such ineffective traceability management, where traceability relationships between artifacts are still manually generated and maintained. This paper aims at presenting an approach and a prototype for automatically generating and maintaining the appropriate traceability links between heterogeneous artifacts ranging from requirement models, through design models, down to simulation and verification results throughout the product life cycle in model-based design of CPSs. A use case study is presented to validate and illustrate the proposed method and prototype.