Verwendung von Traceability-Modellen zur Unterstützung der Entwicklung technischer Systeme

When developing complex mechatronic products a big number of digital product-defining artefacts is generated in highly specialized software tools. Even experienced developers have difficulties to fully understand the interdependencies between these artefacts. It is the primary aim of traceability to make these interdependencies explicit by using information technology in order to support product development. Currently there are two main obstacles for the broader use of traceability in industrial practice: the high effort required to capture the traceability model and the unclear benefits of its usage. The latter is the main motivation for this thesis: namely to develop innovative concepts for the usage of traceability information in the development of mechatronic products. To address this challenge, the present thesis is investigating how established development methods can be supported by artefact-spanning traceability models. For a selection of these methods (e. g. FMEA and House of Quality) concepts of how they can be assisted with traceability information are elaborated. A software prototype was implemented for the method House of Quality in order to exemplarily verify the developed concept. A further benefit of traceability information is that its visualization supports developers in comprehending complex systems. Therefore a concept for visualizing artefact-spanning traceability information is developed that also takes the specifics of mechatronics into account. It is evaluated through a user study and implemented in the prototypical visualization software Ariadne’s Eye, which itself is compared with conventional visualization solutions through established readability metrics. Traceability can also play an important role in engineering change management, since traceability models allow for an efficient analysis of potential change impacts. For that reason a traceability-based impact analysis method for mechatronic products is developed, whose efficiency is verified through a user study. This method is then combined with Ariadne’s Eye to a visual, dialogue-based assistance system for impact analyses. Another user study shows that the efficiency and user acceptance of the developed solution is significantly better than impact analyses based on matrix- or list-visualization. In this manner the present thesis offers a variety of traceability usage solutions for different phases of the development process for mechatronic products. It therefore provides a significant contribution in promoting the introduction of traceability in industry.