A recipe for tool interoperability

Typical engineering and verification workflows for safety-relevant systems are performed with many different tools. For such workflows safety standards like the automotive ISO 26262 require traceability of all V&V-related work products. Therefore, efficient tool-integration, while ensuring all traceability needs for functional safety, is a highly relevant topic for industrial domains. Recent research projects like CESAR have addressed this topic by reusing tools and methods for different workflows in the context of requirements and systems engineering as well as verification and validation. This reuse is done in a Reference Technology Platform (RTP) with common services and a common understanding of exchanged information based on an Interoperability Specification (IOS). Recently, OSLC is discussed for such an IOS. The open question is how tools are connected efficiently and how traceability is ensured. This document provides a guideline on how to use the IOS for engineering workflows performed with different tools based on OSLC. We call it recipe. The recipe was developed in the MBAT project. It considers a systematic definition of semantic concepts for an IOS ensuring traceability and the level of granularity required to perform workflows with a set of tools.