Enhancing traceability in heterogeneous design platforms

Abstract

Companies are frequently using in-house developed scripts, macros and applications to support and automate the development of products and product variants. These items are often of different types creating a design platform with a multitude of dependencies. Such environments are often difficult to overview and maintain. In the current paper, an aerospace company with a design platform that has proven challenging to maintain has been studied. A method and limited software implementation have been tested and evaluated by interviewing four professionals at the company. The implementation provides a high granularity, which has been found to be necessary to give a quick platform overview and to facilitate maintenance and expansion of the design platform.