A logical approach to systems engineering artifacts: semantic relationships and dependencies beyond traceability—from requirements to functional and architectural views

Not only system assurance drives a need for semantically richer relationships across various artifacts, work products, and items of information than are implied in the terms “trace and traceability” as used in current standards and textbooks. This paper deals with the task of working out artifacts in software and system development, their representation, and the analysis and documentation of the relationships between their logical contents—herein referred to as tracing and traceability; this is a richer meaning of traceability than in standards like IEEE STD 830. Among others, key tasks in system development are as follows: capturing, analyzing, and documenting system-level requirements, the step to functional system specifications, the step to architectures given by the decomposition of systems into subsystems with their connections and behavioral interactions. Each of these steps produces artifacts for documenting the development, as a basis for a specification and a design rationale, for documentation, for verification, and impact analysis of change requests. Crucial questions are how to represent and formalize the content of these artifacts and how to relate their content to support, in particular, system assurance. When designing multi-functional systems, key artifacts are system-level requirements, functional specifications, and architectures in terms of their subsystem specifications. Links and traces between these artifacts are introduced to relate their contents. Traceability has the goal to relate artifacts. It is required for instance in standards for functional system safety such as the ISO 26262. An approach to specifying semantic relationships is shown, such that the activity of creating and using (navigating through) these relationships can be supported with automation.