Context-Aware Traceability Across Heterogeneous Modelling Environments

Most industrial software development processes rely on a variety of tools that are specialized in particular development tasks. As the number of modelling tools involved in a development process increases, handling the heterogeneity of model artefacts and interoperability between tools becomes a complex task. As traceability is mandated by regulations and standards, it has been one of the main drivers for the establishment of semantically rich relations between model artefacts in order to facilitate the generation of compliance evidence required for certification. While there are modelling tools that provide interoperability features with other modelling languages or tools, there is no rigorous and automated approach for capturing semantic relationships across heterogeneous modelling environments. We argue that having a structured, automated and technology-agnostic approach to declare the relationships between heterogeneous artefacts (e.g. through model mappings) can increase the maintainability of the model management operations and grant more flexibility to switch tools for any development task. In this work we propose an architecture that facilitates life cycle- and system- wide context-awareness in heterogeneous modelling environments and enables the automation of model management tasks through semantically rich relationships between heterogeneous model artefacts. For this purpose, we define context-awareness as the ability to capture and manage the frames of knowledge of the development process e.g. software architecture, testing artefacts, applicable standards, etc.