Meta-modelling approach to traceability for avionics: a framework for managing the engineering of computer based aerospace systems

Traceability is the common term for mechanisms to record and navigate relationships between artifacts produced by development and assessment processes. Effective management of these relationships is crucial to projects involving the development of complex, safety critical computer based aerospace systems. Practitioners use a range of notations to model such systems. 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 for Avionics) that enables traceability links to be established and consistency maintained across data from potentially disjoint tools.