An Integrated Approach to Ensure Requirements Traceability During the Product Development Process

Today’s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platforms are a fundamental strategy for the development of complex products because of their capability to integrate processes, business systems, and information getting a complete and clear vision of all the various stages of the product development process and supporting the design and management of an extensive set of requirements. Nevertheless, common PLM platforms lack efficient traceability of design requirements within the product development process. Rather than a stand-alone tool for requirements management, it is desirable to take a design method that places requirements in the spotlight of the design process. For this reason, the paper presents a method, based on the Requirement - Functional - Logical - Physical (RFLP) design approach, that ensures requirements traceability during each stage of the product development process and provides decision support in a multidisciplinary collaborative digital environment. In particular, Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform has been adopted for the case study of the suspension and tyre systems of a vehicle to assess the efficacy of the proposed method and validate the integration within the collaborative business experience platform.