Traceability for system families

System families are an idea of software reuse in a specific problem domain. Existing methods have little requirements engineering support for system family development. This paper proposes a requirements meta-model for system family development. Traceability throughout the model elements is a necessary pre-condition for preserving the consistency of the complete family model during development and is a main issue in this paper as well as for software development in general. Family development based on the meta-model guarantees traceability by the inclusion of all development artifacts in a single and consistent model.