Discovering traces between textual requirements and logical models in the functional design of Printed Circuit Boards
Eduardo Cibrián, José María Álvarez-Rodríguez, Roy Mendieta, Juan Lloréns · 2022
Traceability management is a critical activity in the engineering process and management of critical systems to know why a system artefact exists and to perform certain operations such as change impact analysis or consistency checking. In this context, the process to create traces is usually done manually by engineers. Although some tools can suggest traces between system artefacts based on some metadata, the reality shows that the information embedded in the whole set of system artefacts is not completely exploited. That is why, in this work, authors propose a traceability function to discover traces between system artefacts (requirements and logical models) based on the semantic representation of the artefact content. Then, this semantic representation is used to implement a trace engine based on the topological comparison of the underlying conceptual graphs. This functionality is implemented on top of the Arrowhead framework creating a toolchain comprising 3 tools (MSExcel, Capella and the Traceability Studio). A case study is also conducted in the field of Printed Circuit Board (PCB) design to assess both the technological feasibility of the approach and the quality of the discovery process (73% of precision) between 11 logical models and 66 textual requirements.