Link and Trace Requirements for Activity Diagram

Requirements are a collection of statements describing the desired behavior and characteristics of a system. Requirements help ensure system design integrity and should be achievable, verifiable, unambiguous, and consistent with each other. Each level of design should have appropriate requirements. You can link requirements to elements of your activity diagrams to ensure traceability and verify that the behavior of the system aligns with the specified needs. A Requirements Toolbox™ license is required to link, trace, and manage requirements in System Composer™.

This topic shows how to work with requirements within an activity diagram. The example shows a functional flow diagram for modeling a mobile robot architecture that travels between a randomized starting point and destination.

Open Model

Open the example.

openExample('systemcomposer/OpenActivityDiagramForRobotExample');

Open the project.

openProject("scMobileRobotExample");

For more information on this example, see Author Activity Diagrams.

Link Requirements to Activity Diagram Elements

To view requirements, navigate to Apps > Requirements Manager.

To link a requirement, select the component Plan Path. Then, in the Requirements Manager (Requirements Toolbox), right-click the requirement Transportation and select Link from. You can also link a requirement using Requirements Editor (Requirements Toolbox). For more information, see Link and Trace Requirements.

The badge on a component indicates that it is linked to a requirement. Click this badge to show or hide requirements on the activity diagram canvas.

Trace Requirements

When you click an element in the Requirements Perspective, the software highlights linked requirements. Conversely, when you click a requirement, the software shows linked elements.

In the RobotActivity example, the Select Target Position, Compute Self Position, and Plan Path action nodes implement the stakeholder requirement of Transportation. When you click a requirement, this information is also available in the Property Inspector.

You can visualize traceability of requirements and their relationships using a traceability diagram. For more information, see Visualize Links with Traceability Diagrams (Requirements Toolbox).