Introducing TRAILS: A tool supporting traceability, integration and visualisation of engineering knowledge for product service systems development
Abstract Developing state of the art product service systems (PSS) requires the intense collaboration of different engineering domains, such as mechanical, software and service engineering. This can be a challenging task, since each engineering domain uses their own specification artefacts, software tools and data formats. However, to be able to seamlessly integrate the various components that constitute a PSS and also being able to provide comprehensive traceability throughout the entire solution life cycle it is essential to have a common representation of engineering data. To address this issue, we present TRAILS, a novel software tool that joins the heterogeneous artefacts, such as process models, requirements specifications or diagrams of the systems structure. For this purpose, our tool uses a semantic model integration ontology onto which various source formats can be mapped. Overall, our tool provides a wide range of features that supports engineers in ensuring traceability, avoiding system inconsistencies and putting collaborative engineering into practice. Subsequently, we show the practical implementation of our approach using the case study of a bike sharing system and discuss limitations as well as possibilities for future enhancement of TRAILS.