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Digital Thread

The dashboards create a digital thread to capture the attributes and unique identifiers of the artifacts in your project. The digital thread is a set of metadata information about the artifacts in a project, the artifact structure, and the traceability relationships between artifacts.

The dashboards monitor and analyze the digital thread to:

  • Detect when project files move and maintain the same universal unique identifiers (UUIDs) for the artifact files and the elements inside the artifact files

  • Capture traceability and listen to tools, such as the Test Manager in Simulink® Test™, to detect new tool outputs and the dependencies of the tool operations

  • Identify outdated tool outputs by analyzing the traceability and checksums of inputs to the tool operations

  • Create an index of your project and store a representation of each artifact, their inner structure, and their relationships with other artifacts

  • Provide a holistic analysis of your project artifacts to help you maintain traceability and up-to-date information on the requirements, units, tests, and results impacting your design

The dashboard can store the results of the digital thread analysis and then perform traceability analysis across domains, tools, and artifacts, without needing to locally load or access the project artifacts.

As you modify your models and testing artifacts, check that you save the changes to the artifacts files and store the files that you want to analyze in your project.

To identify and maintain traceability relationships, the digital thread requires that your project is set up correctly. The digital thread requires that:

  • Artifacts are saved in the current project.

  • Artifact tracing is enabled for the project. You can view and change the artifact tracing setting in the Startup and Shutdown settings for your project. Select Track tool outputs to detect outdated results to enable artifact tracing.

If an artifact does not appear in the Artifacts panel when you expect it to, see Resolve Missing Artifacts, Links, and Results.

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