Managing (requirements) evolutions of high assurance systems

Summary form only given. Long lifetime high assurance systems (HAS) present, among others, a peculiar property: evolutions are numerous. Because current standards for producing such HAS are not accurate enough regarding evolutions, we have considered that all the artefacts, which are produced during their development, should be recorded. Recording artefacts means developing an IS. By applying well-known IS principles supported by a relational database, we have considered their models, and then their exploitation. For the modelling part we have taken into account all the artefacts and their relationships, according to accurate representative UML abstract diagrams. Indeed, UML allows representing both static and dynamic aspects of any system. Because evolution management is the most difficult part of the HAS lifetime, we emphasise modelling requirements and evolutions. We show how these abstract UML meta-models and their instantiations can be used in two different ways: we have built up a Web database, which takes advantage of existing browsers, and, because recording all the artefacts is cumbersome, we have translated the abstract metamodels into a set of verification rules that allow manual checking of HAS properties such as release compatibility.