Requirements traceability in simulation driven development

The key success factors in development of complex systems are among the following: 1. systematic processes and life cycle model (such as ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288 and its daughter standards) 2. a systematic model for the engineering artefacts and their relations (such as specifications, CAD-models, pieces of information, and so forth) 3. An effective organisation model, - well-defined roles and responsibilities (like systems engineer, requirements engineer, and so forth), - well-defined collaboration model (to facilitate consistent view in all involved organisations of the goal, data and state of the development) 4. well-planned use of project management and systems engineering tools, - a good selection of engineering tools (model based tools advocated), - a flexible tool integration model (to allow integration of various tools used by the collaboration partners) 5. a tool to orchestrate all of the above (such as a PLM tool). This report addresses the second success factor, systematic model for the engineering artefacts. The particular focus is on the traceability of the engineering artefacts in simulation oriented systems development. The ultimate goal is to integrate the artefacts (such as simulation results) produced by the simulation engineers and their software tools with the other artefacts of the development processes; current practices easily leave simulation engineers on their distinct islands without knowing the original stakeholder requirements, the consequent system requirements and the specific rationale for a specific simulation task. Engineering artefacts include, among others, requirements specifications, system functions specifications, system architecture descriptions and verification and validation artefacts, simulation related artefacts being a part of the verification and validation artefacts. In complex systems, arrangements for traceability and impact analysis play an important role in managing the iterative systems development. To provide the traceability of engineering artefacts, a traceability information model and a tool to implement it is required. This report presents a systems engineering artefacts model titled SEAModel to facilitate creation of traceability information models. Some possible tools to implement SEAModel are discussed, and finally a demonstration done to ensure feasibility of SEAModel in simulation driven demonstration case is reported.