Traceability Relationships Research Articles

Research on modeling method of providing oxygen functional architecture based on model

Abstract The provision of oxygen is an important function of commercial aircraft, which is defined as providing the necessary oxygen for the safety of everyone on board, including crew oxygen, passenger oxygen, and portable oxygen. This article adopts SysML modelling language and proposes a model-based architecture modelling method for providing oxygen function for commercial aircraft. It transforms traditional experience and document-based system engineering work into functional architecture system engineering work, and utilises the correlation and traceability relationships of models to achieve state machine modelling for providing oxygen functional architecture. Through simulation verification, the functional architecture modelling method that provides oxygen can be effectively applied to the architecture of other systems.

Mission analysis and design of launch vehicle based on MBSE

A reusable launch vehicle is the basis for carrying out large-scale space activities and reducing the cost of space entry. It will greatly enhance the ability to enter space independently and come up with higher requirements for mission planning, demonstration, overall design, and system development of launch vehicles. Based on the model-based system engineering (MBSE) method, the forward process of model-based launch vehicle mission analysis and design is proposed first. Then, taking a launch vehicle as an example, the mission analysis and design are carried out, the mission is defined, the stakeholder requirements and mission requirements are identified, the mission application scenario is analyzed, the mission architecture is built, and the mission requirements model is established. Finally, by establishing the traceability relationship of mission requirements, the forward process of launch vehicle mission analysis is preliminarily realized, and the feasibility of the process is verified. It is of great engineering significance to improve the efficiency of launch vehicle mission analysis and system design.

A calibration methodology for the novel radioluminescence detector systems

Radioluminescence mapping using well-characterized and optimized optical systems is an effective method for localizing contamination with alpha-emitting radionuclides. To apply this novel approach to radiological emergency management, nuclear safeguards, nuclear decommissioning, and nuclear forensics, an established traceability chain is required. This work presents the development and implementation of a novel calibration methodology to provide valuable information about, and confidence in, the performance of radioluminescence detection systems. The proposed calibration methodology is based on two complementary approaches: (a) application of well-characterized activity standards to establish a traceable relationship between radioluminescence intensity and alpha activity, and (b) use of all optical radiation-based devices that, when calibrated against an alpha activity standard, simulate the radioluminescence induced in nitrogen (N2) and nitric oxide (NO) gases by alpha particles in specific spectral regions. A dedicated 210Po alpha activity standard with a narrow peak of less than 32keV FWHM at 5.3MeV has been developed and used to characterize a lens-based radioluminescence detection system in terms of its sensitivity to alpha-induced radioluminescence in different atmospheres (air, N2, N2 ＋ NO mixture) in the UV-A and UV-C (solar blind) spectral regions. The characterized lens system was then used as an intermediary transfer device to cross-calibrate two portable integrating sphere-based radiance standards designed to simulate radioluminescence in the UV-A and UV-C spectral regions. Both radiance standards can be used as transfer standards simulating up to 510MBq when used in the UV-A and up to 8.7GBq when used in the UV-C spectral regions. They substantially simplify routine quality control of radioluminescence detection systems by eliminating the need for open alpha sources, which are always associated with strict radiation safety precautions. Furthermore, since radiance standards can operate in a wide range of intensities, linearity and detection limits of radioluminescence detectors can be readily determined. The design, construction, radiometric characterization, and calibration of dedicated transfer standards, as well as the development of new calibration procedures for radiometric traceability of radioluminescence detection systems, will enable appropriate accident and post-accident radiation measurements that will lead to more effective countermeasures and better protection of people, wildlife, and the environment.

Dynamic calibration method for track geometry measurement system-a case study in China

With the rapid development of railway construction, the mileage of railway detection has increased dramatically, and railway companies have higher requirements for the repeatability and accuracy of track geometric dynamic detection data. Therefore, the track geometry measurement system needs to be calibrated to improve the measurement accuracy to ensure the safety of railway operation. However, the existing calibration methods of the track geometry measurement system can only realize the static calibration and lack the dynamic calibration method, which cannot calibrate the track geometry measurement system under the real operation state. Therefore, a dynamic calibration method for the track geometry measurement system is proposed in this paper. A real and reliable test environment is provided for the track geometry measurement system by presetting the track geometry irregularity and laying the rail dynamic displacement monitoring system on the calibration test line, and the dynamic and static differences of the track are analyzed based on the test environment. Based on the bisection method, this paper reduces the measurement error of the track geometry measurement system and analyzes the measurement repeatability of the track geometry measurement system. Finally, the error correction model of the track geometry measurement system is established, and the error analysis and uncertainty evaluation of the track geometry measurement system are carried out. The results show that the track geometry measurement system calibrated by the dynamic calibration method proposed in this paper meets the requirements of the measurement error for the gauge and cross level. This study can establish the value traceability relationship of the track geometry measurement system, realize the calibration and evaluation of the accuracy of the track geometry measurement system under the real operation state, and improve the reliability and accuracy of the track geometry dynamic detection results.

An innovative blockchain-based system for human resources digitalization with traceable relationship management

Small and Midsize Enterprises (SMEs) have faced innovative changes in their organizational structure, especially in human resources (HR) and employee management: these digital structural changes have transformed their business practices and strategies. The employees with new technical skills have also been impactful in this digitalization. The HR departments in SMEs have become increasingly pivotal in recruiting new employees and supporting existing employees throughout the organization. ITSvil in Salerno (Italy) has developed the Easywork project based on the “Fenice” microservices architecture. This system supports the HR departments in efficiently managing HR activities through digitalization. The first step in acquiring new resources is formulating the employment contract, which is essential for stipulating agreements on specific job requirements. Blockchain technology and smart contracts are among recent technological innovations impacting this process. Writing contracts in digital codes to simplify and effectively manage the legal relationship involving bureaucratic tasks and cost management is now possible. The new digital system makes employment contract processing transparent, traceable, and reliable. This research presents the design and development of a new microservice compatible and integrable process with the “Fenice” system based on blockchain technology. The proposed digital system aims to make HR management activities more transparent and traceable.

A Systematic and Traceable MOSA Evaluation Process for Systems Architectures: A Digital Engineering Tool

AbstractA process for evaluating the degree to which an architecture embraces Modular Open Systems Approaches (MOSA) is germane to ensuring that MOSA principles are actually used in the development of defense systems architectures. Furthermore, such a process provides artifacts that can be used by program offices to justify their key architectural decisions and prove they embrace MOSA as required. Therefore, an approach which facilitates the assessment of architecture requirements for MOSA compliance—rather than system designs or products—provides the added benefit of ensuring applicable MOSA quality attributes are incorporated into architectures during the requirements development phase. To this end, a systematic and traceable MOSA evaluation process which uses derived sets of evaluable criteria to evaluate architecture requirements is developed. The process utilizes a digital engineering approach to establish, within the authoritative source of truth (model), traceability relationships that can be queried, analyzed, and used to validate whether the architecture and resultant system will exhibit modularity and openness characteristics.

Analysis of commodity traceability service effects on the purchase behavior of consumers using an evolutionary game model

Blockchain-based commodity traceability is an emerging technology developed in recent years; it plays a vital role in monitoring product quality and responding to product safety problems. Considering the perceived value of product traceability for consumers and the cost of using blockchain technology, determining whether merchants adopt blockchain-based commodity traceability technology deserves attention. Based on the information asymmetry between consumers and merchants, this paper establishes a two-party evolutionary game model to understand whether merchants enable the commodity traceability function and whether consumers choose to be involved in the commodity traceability relationship based on the Foote, Cone, and Belding grid theory. The model explores the influence boundary of merchants enabling the commodity traceability function for consumers with different degrees of involvement in purchasing behavior. The results show that traceability cost, consumer involvement, commodity price, and the value-added traceability nature of different commodities affect the evolution results. These results indicate that businesses need to constantly reduce the cost of traceability to improve consumer involvement and the perceived value of commodity traceability. Businesses must identify consumers with different involvement levels, and commodities with different traceability levels should provide targeted services for consumers and commodities.

Requirements document relations

Relations between requirements are part of nearly every requirements engineering approach. Yet, relations of views, such as requirements documents, are scarcely considered. This is remarkable as requirements documents and their structure are a key factor in requirements reuse, which is still challenging. Explicit formalized relations between documents can help to ensure consistency, improve completeness, and facilitate review activities in general. For example, this is relevant in space engineering, where many challenges related to complex document dependencies occur: 1. Several contractors contribute to a project. 2. Requirements from standards have to be applied in several projects. 3. Requirements from previous phases have to be reused. We exploit the concept of “layered traceability”, explicitly considering documents as views on sets of individual requirements and specific traceability relations on and between all of these representation layers. Different types of relations and their dependencies are investigated with a special focus on requirement reuse through standards and formalized in an Object-Role Modelling (ORM) conceptual model. Automated analyses of requirement graphs based on this model are able to reveal document inconsistencies. We show examples of such queries in Neo4J/Cypher for the EagleEye case study. This work aims to be a step toward a better support to handle highly complex requirement document dependencies in large projects with a special focus on requirements reuse and to enable automated quality checks on dependent documents to facilitate requirements reviews.

A model-driven approach for continuous performance engineering in microservice-based systems

Microservices are quite widely impacting on the software industry in recent years. Rapid evolution and continuous deployment represent specific benefits of microservice-based systems, but they may have a significant impact on non-functional properties like performance. Despite the obvious relevance of this property, there is still a lack of systematic approaches that explicitly take into account performance issues in the lifecycle of microservice-based systems.In such a context of evolution and re-deployment, Model-Driven Engineering techniques can provide major support to various software engineering activities, and in particular they can allow managing the relationships between a running system and its architectural model.In this paper, we propose a model-driven integrated approach that exploits traceability relationships between the monitored data of a microservice-based running system and its architectural model to derive recommended refactoring actions that lead to performance improvement. The approach has been applied and validated on two microservice-based systems, in the domain of e-commerce and ticket reservation, respectively, whose architectural models have been designed in UML profiled with MARTE.

An Integrated Framework for Traceability and Impact Analysis in Requirements Verification of Cyber–Physical Systems

In the field of model-based design of Cyber–Physical Systems (CPS), seamless traceability of the process, from requirements to models to simulation results, is becoming increasingly important. It can be used to support several activities such as variant handling, impact analysis, component reuse, software maintenance and evolution, verification, and validation. Despite the fact that the relevance of traceability in the model-based design of CPSs is well known, current tools that support traceability management are inadequate in practice. The lack of comprehensive whole-lifecycle systems engineering support in a single tool is one of the main causes of such ineffective traceability management, where traceability relationships between artifacts are still manually generated and maintained. This paper aims at presenting an approach and a prototype for automatically generating and maintaining the appropriate traceability links between heterogeneous artifacts ranging from requirement models, through design models, down to simulation and verification results throughout the product life cycle in model-based design of CPSs. A use case study is presented to validate and illustrate the proposed method and prototype.

Using tool integration for improving traceability management testing processes: An automotive industrial experience

AbstractDespite the high relevance of traceability in software processes, the activities of traceability creation and management are not always adequately supported in practice. The lack of integration between the tools adopted in the development processes is one of the main causes of such an ineffective management, where traceability relationships are still manually generated and maintained. In this paper we present an industrial experience we performed for improving the traceability management in a testing process performed in the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles company. In this context, we carried out a process for analyzing and identifying the main issues due to the ineffective traceability management and proposed a solution for addressing them. We designed and implemented a software architecture for integrating the existing application lifecycle management platform with the tools used in the process with the aim of automating the process execution and the traceability links management. The new architecture was validated by a case study that showed how the integration solution produced beneficial effects on quality attributes of the testing process.

Towards A Knowledge Base for Software Developers to Choose Suitable Traceability Techniques

Huge amount of techniques for creating, maintaining and/or recovering traceability among software development artifacts have been proposed. It is thus not easy for a potential user of such techniques to choose a technique suitable for his/her project because too many techniques exist and projects are different from each other. In this paper, we proposed a model for characterizing a traceability technique with respect to its users. The model can become a meta-model of the knowledge base for such users. The model is designed on the basis of the contents of existing technical papers so that we can easily describe model instances on the basis of technical papers. The model is represented in a feature model, and it has four mandatory features: source, destination, consequence and process. The user can at least understand a technique is unsuitable for him/her by referring such features. If a technique estimates the traceability relationships, the instance of its feature model may contain the quality metrics of its estimation such as precision and recall. It has also several optional features: assumptions, preprocess and tool. Although we sometimes cannot obtain such optional features from technical papers, they are so helpful for a user to decide a technique suitable for him/her. On the basis of the feature model, we described model instances of several techniques in technical papers. We also examined and discussed who the suitable user for each technique is.

Personal Software Process with Automatic Requirements Traceability to Support Startups

This paper applies Personal Software Process (PSP) for software development activities, and uses PSP scripts to follow the activities in software development. In particular, we have adapted a development script in order to enable automatic traceability. The script is the cyclical process that is designed for developing a large program in a sequence of small incremental steps. Moreover, we have extended an XTraQue tool to enable an automatic traceability during using PSP. This enables the completeness of traceability during using PSP. The Part-of-Speech (POS) embedded XML-based templates of software artefacts for PSP-based development, that is, functional requirements (FR), use case, and class diagram are defined. We perform an explanatory case study in order to evaluate the effectiveness between manual and automatic traceability during the personal software process (PSP). In particular, the causal links between software artefacts created during software development are so-called traceability relations. The result evaluation are concerned with precision and recall measures on the creation of traceability relations.

Are the expected benefits of requirements reuse hampered by distance? An experiment.

BackgroundSoftware development processes are often performed by distributed teams which may be separated by great distances. Global software development (GSD) has undergone a significant growth in recent years. The challenges concerning GSD are especially relevant to requirements engineering (RE). Stakeholders need to share a common ground, but there are many difficulties as regards the potentially variable interpretation of the requirements in different contexts. We posit that the application of requirements reuse techniques could alleviate this problem through the diminution of the number of requirements open to misinterpretation.ResultsThis paper presents a reuse-based approach with which to address RE in GSD, with special emphasis on specification techniques, namely parameterised requirements and traceability relationships. An experiment was carried out with the participation of 29 university students enrolled on a Computer Science and Engineering course. Two main scenarios that represented co-localisation and distribution in software development were portrayed by participants from Spain and Morocco. The global teams achieved a slightly better performance than the co-located teams as regards effectiveness, which could be a result of the worse productivity of the global teams in comparison to the co-located teams. Subjective perceptions were generally more positive in the case of the distributed teams (difficulty, speed and understanding), with the exception of quality.ConclusionsA theoretical model has been proposed as an evaluation framework with which to analyse, from the point of view of the factor of distance, the effect of requirements specification techniques on a set of performance and perception-based variables. The experiment utilised a new internationalisation requirements catalogue. None of the differences found between co-located and distributed teams were significant according to the outcome of our statistical tests. The well-known benefits of requirements reuse in traditional co-located projects could, therefore, also be expected in GSD projects.

MeTAGeM-Trace: Improving trace generation in model transformation by leveraging the role of transformation models

In the context of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), generation of traces can be automated using the implicit traceability relationships contained in any model transformation. Besides, if transformations are developed adopting a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach, i.e. promoting the role of models and the level of automation, model transformation will benefit from the promised advantages of MDE in terms of less costly software development while reducing the inherent complexity of coding model transformations. To put these ideas into practice, this work introduces MeTAGeM-Trace, the first prototype of an EMF-based toolkit for the MDD of model-to-model transformations which supports trace generation, i.e. it allows developing model transformations that produce not only the corresponding target models, but also a trace model between the elements of the source and target models involved in the transformation.

Components Association Mechanism Supporting Requirements Tracing

Requirements Traceability has a very important role in the entire application development lifecycle. As for the problem of manual creating requirement traceability relationship time-consuming and error-prone effort problem, this paper proposed a new component-based dynamic requirement traceability model. The model incorporates the requirements specification model and component functionality tree model to format requirements documents and component library. Establish requirements traceability relationships through mutual matching between component facet functional items and requirement documents. Validate requirements traceability feasibility and efficiency through multiple systems and component requirements documents, the experimental results provided by the implemented system show that the model is valid, and efficiency and accuracy have been improved to some extent compared with the conventional information retrieval model.

The Essential Nature of Product Traceability and its Relation to Agile Approaches

This is a discussion of the essential features of product development traceability maps in relation to requirements, architecture, functional models, components, and tests as a set of order type hierarchies and their cross-links. This paper lays out the structure of these ideal traceability relationships that define the essence of the product under development. The importance of the trace relationships to the product is clarified and then the abandonment of traceability in the Agile approach is discussed. Following that, a way to transform between synthetic canonical narrative (story) representations that appear in the product backlog and the traditionally separate hierarchical form of the trace structure of the product will be examined. The fact that it is possible to transform back and forth between the canonic narrative and traditional hierarchical representations of trace structures, and the fact that trace structures can be produced in a ‘just in time’ fashion that evolves during product development demonstrate that these trace structures can be used in both an Agile and Lean fashion within the development process. Also, we can show that when the trace structure is produced outside the narrative representation it can have the additional benefit of helping to determine the precedent order of development so that rework can be avoided. The lack of the extrinsic external trace structure of the product that gives access to its intelligibility is, in fact, a form of technical debt. Thus, traditional trace structures using this model can be seen as an essential tool for product owners to produce sound and coherent development narratives and for structuring and prioritizing the backlog in the Agile and Lean approaches to software and systems development.

Managing requirements uncertainty with partial models

Models are good at expressing information that is known but do not typically have support for representing what information a modeler does not know at a particular phase in the software development process. Partial models address this by being able to precisely represent uncertainty about model content. In previous work, we developed a general approach for defining partial models and applied it to capturing uncertainty, including reasoning over design models containing uncertainty. In this paper, we show how to apply our approach to managing requirements uncertainty. In particular, we address the problem of specifying uncertainty within a requirements model, refining a model as uncertainty reduces and reasoning with traceability relations between models containing uncertainty. We illustrate our approach using the meeting scheduler example.

Tackling the Challenges of Evolution in Multiperspective Software Design and Implementation

The design and implementation of software require the usage of different perspectives and views to cope with its static structure, dynamic behavior, and requirements. Artifacts of different views are dependent on each other and subject of frequent changes. Anticipating those changes becomes difficult, as most impact analysis approaches are not designed to work in multiperspective environments. They treat artifacts of different perspectives in isolation, which tends to introduce further inconsistencies and faults. In the related research area of consistency checking, the problem of multiple views has been addressed for a long time and solutions have been developed. We aim on combining the predictive capabilities of impact analysis with the approach of multiperspective consistency checking, to bridge the gap between artifacts of different views. We propose an approach which facilitates impact analysis of different UML models and Java source code. Our approach is based on impact propagation rules, which analyze traceability relations between software artifacts and the type of change applied by a developer.

Towards automated traceability maintenance

Traceability relations support stakeholders in understanding the dependencies between artifacts created during the development of a software system and thus enable many development-related tasks. To ensure that the anticipated benefits of these tasks can be realized, it is necessary to have an up-to-date set of traceability relations between the established artifacts. This goal requires the creation of traceability relations during the initial development process. Furthermore, the goal also requires the maintenance of traceability relations over time as the software system evolves in order to prevent their decay. In this paper, an approach is discussed that supports the (semi-) automated update of traceability relations between requirements, analysis and design models of software systems expressed in the UML. This is made possible by analyzing change events that have been captured while working within a third-party UML modeling tool. Within the captured flow of events, development activities comprised of several events are recognized. These are matched with predefined rules that direct the update of impacted traceability relations. The overall approach is supported by a prototype tool and empirical results on the effectiveness of tool-supported traceability maintenance are provided.