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

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, rely on open-source data -- as opposed to automotive (or any industry) data -- and do not address the validation of manual links established by engineers. Additionally, automotive requirements often exhibit variations in the way they are expressed, posing challenges for supervised models requiring training. The 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. We empirically evaluate TVR on automotive requirements, achieving 98.87% accuracy in traceability validation and 85.50% correctness in traceability recovery. Additionally, TVR demonstrates strong robustness, achieving 97.13% in accuracy when handling unseen requirements variations. The results highlight the practical effectiveness of RAG-based LLM approaches in industrial settings, offering a promising solution for improving requirements traceability in complex automotive systems.