Just-in-time traceability for mechatronics systems

Effective traceability can be very costly and difficult to achieve in mechatronics systems due to their overall size and complexity. Such systems are often specified and designed in terms of software, electrical, mechanical, and thermodynamic elements, and associated models are represented and stored in various formats and locations. Traceability is of critical concern in such systems, which must often demonstrably comply to a wide range of regulatory codes. To address this problem we present an enterprise level architectural solution for establishing organization wide traceability across a variety of model types. While our approach is applicable to any enterprise level tracing environment, we focus on the mechatronics problem and illustrate our solution with a prototype tool that delivers semi-automated traceability between the regulatory codes, requirements, and systems models of a mechatronics system.