Towards an integrated systems engineering environment

Traceability is the common term for mechanisms to record and navigate relationships between artifacts produced by development processes. Effective management of these relationships is crucial to the success of systems engineering projects. Practitioners on such projects typically use a wide range of notations and techniques to model the product(s) they are developing. Most have tool support, though a lack of well-defined approaches to integration limits traceability between their respective data sets. This paper proposes a framework known as MATra (Meta-modelling Approach to Traceability) that enables traceability links to be established and consistency maintained across data from potentially disjoint tools.