TVR: Automotive System Requirement Traceability Validation and Recovery Through Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Abstract

In automotive software development, as well as other domains, traceability between stakeholder requirements and system requirements is crucial to ensure consistency, correctness, and regulatory compliance. However, erroneous or missing traceability relationships often arise due to improper propagation of requirement changes or human errors in requirement mapping, leading to inconsistencies and increased maintenance costs. Existing approaches do not address traceability between stakeholder and system requirements, and are not validated on industrial data, where the links between requirements are established manually by engineers. Additionally, automotive requirements often exhibit variations in the way they are expressed, posing challenges for training-based approaches. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) provide new opportunities to address these challenges. In this paper, we introduce TVR, a requirement Traceability Validation and Recovery approach primarily targeting automotive systems, leveraging LLMs enhanced with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). TVR is designed to validate existing traceability links and recover missing ones with high accuracy. The experimental results highlight the practical effectiveness of TVR in industrial settings, offering a promising solution for improving requirements traceability in complex automotive systems.