The ReQonsult MATLAB® Connector connects MATLAB® with ALM and PLM systems to ensure efficiency, quality, and compliance.
Work faster, make fewer mistakes, enjoy full traceability – the Connector leads to secure, auditable development processes.
An automotive manufacturer uses the ReQonsult MATLAB® Connector to connect engineering artifacts directly to ALM and PLM systems.
Traceability brings strategic advantages: it creates transparency, reduces complexity, ensures regulatory compliance, facilitates audits, and enables better products to be developed and delivered more quickly.
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The ReQonsult MATLAB® Connector connects MATLAB® with ALM/PLM systems and creates bidirectional traceability. This allows requirements, tests, and changes to be linked efficiently. This saves time, reduces manual work, and makes it easier for teams to collaborate in the development process.
The Connector also supports compliance with regulatory standards and certifications: it seamlessly integrates external systems, makes changes traceable, and promotes structured working—ideal for industries with high compliance requirements.
Ensure traceability from MATLAB® to ALM/PLM requirements and increase your compliance with complete and consistent coverage.
Benefit from the flexible architecture that precisely connects MATLAB® with ALM/PLM systems and supports individual processes.
Experience user-friendly MATLAB® integration with ALM/PLM systems for clear traceability and workflows without additional effort.
The ReQonsult Connector directly connects MATLAB® or Simulink® to various ALM and PLM systems, creating universal traceability.
Requirements are imported into MATLAB® so teams can work offline, see changes easily, and have all relevant context data readily available.
Our Connector creates surrogates for MATLAB® artifacts, enabling immediate traceability reports and impact analysis in target systems.
The Connector intelligently links external ALM and PLM systems, creating a central, end-to-end integration that combines data flows, ensures traceability, and improves collaboration across teams.
The Connector connects MATLAB® to Jira® to link issues, epics, and stories, ensure traceability, and synchronize changes.
MATLAB® integrates with GitHub®, linking to Issues to manage and track Changes and Defects throughout development.
MATLAB® is connected to Trello®, Simulink® elements are linked to cards and lists, and agile workflows are supported through tracking.
MATLAB® is connected to easeRequirements® (previously Requirements for Jira® / R4J) and Simulink® artifacts are linked to Jira® requirements.
Access and manage ALM artifacts directly in Simulink without additional tools, enabling bi-directional traceability throughout development.
The Connector is flexibly expandable. Upon request, we will be happy to check whether your desired tool can be integrated if it is not yet supported.
Request a no-obligation demo now and get to know the ReQonsult MATLAB® Connector. Our experts will advise you on industry-specific issues and show you live how you can sustainably increase efficiency and compliance.
Nick Entin – Head of Research & Development
The connector’s features are designed to make your development easier: with smarter workflows, less effort, and more focus on innovation. This lets you easily connect MATLAB® to ALM or PLM systems.
Provided as a MATLAB® toolbox, remote system support, and flexible adaptation to various ALM/PLM platforms.
Import, direct linking, and bidirectional traceability between artifacts and objects with optional surrogate creation.
Automatic synchronization and cleanup of links. Planned: test management support and integration into CI/CD workflows.
Master complexity with the ReQonsult MATLAB® Connector: Increase your security and efficiency, ensure compliance, automate traceability, and create seamless connections to ALM/PLM systems.
We enable users to identify and link external artifacts in MATLAB® and maintain consistent traceability over time.
End-to-end traceability is enabled, which is required for regulatory standards, audits, and certifications.
Teams can work in their usual tools and still track requirements, tests, and changes across systems.
Download our ReQonsult MATLAB® Connector product data sheet and discover how seamless traceability between MATLAB® and ALM/PLM systems enables you to work efficiently and in compliance with audits.
Detailed answers to frequently asked questions about the ReQonsult MATLAB® Connector. Learn how to use the Connector to optimize traceability, simplify processes, and make development projects more efficient.
The ReQonsult MATLAB® Connector is a powerful tool that enables seamless traceability between MATLAB®/Simulink® and ALM or PLM systems. It simplifies the verification of requirements implementation, tracking of tests and changes, thereby supporting compliance, efficiency, and quality in regulated development processes.
The ReQonsult MATLAB® Connector enables traceability between ALM/PLM Artifacts, like Requirements, User Stories, Implementation Tasks, Tests, Defects and others with Engineering Artifacts in MATLAB®, like Simulink® blocks, System Composer Components or Ports, Data Dictionary Entries, Source Code, etc.
The ReQonsult MATLAB® Connector allows you to link a wide range of MATLAB® artifacts, for example Simulink® model blocks, test cases, data dictionary elements, and source code, with external objects in ALM or PLM systems. This creates end-to-end traceability between requirements, tests, defects, and implementation.
Imported requirements are fully integrated into MATLAB® and enable offline work, context view, and change tracking. Remote linking only creates references to external ALM or PLM objects without local import, which keeps administration lean but with less direct information and no change notifications.
With use of Surrogates option, linked MATLAB® Artifacts will be created as “proxy” items in corresponding ALM/PLM. For example, when user connects a System Composer Port with a Requirement in Jira®, an extra Issue will be created in Jira® and linked to the Requirement. Thus the target Requirement won’t be touched, and could be even read-only. The surrogate will contain all the information from MATLAB®, picture of the context, and the link back to MATLAB®. In case of using option without Surrogates, the target Requirement will be extended with a link to MATLAB®, thus user of Jira® can navigate directly to MATLAB® to inspect connected object. Administrator of Jira® can set, which issue type will be used for the Surrogate, as well as what kind of link to be used between Surrogates and Requirements for facilitating semantic traceability.
The links from to ALM/PLM will be persisted on the MATLAB® side, using the infrastructure of the Requirements Toolbox. In case of the Connector, it includes the URL of the target container and the ID of the concrete item within this container. For example, URL of a project and the item within the project. On the ALM/PLM side, corresponding links will use the RMI notation of the link to MATLAB® – can see the URL, which MATLAB® offers for the artifacts by right-click on the block, then “Requirements → Copy URL to Clipboard” (note, in different contexts, the menu may look like “Requirements at This Level”).
The ReQonsult MATLAB® Connector currently supports systems such as Jira®, easeRequirements® for Jira (formerly known as R4J), GitHub®, Trello®, and DevRhythm®. Thanks to its open architecture, it can be flexibly connected to other ALM or PLM systems with remote APIs. This allows organizations to integrate their existing tools and easily incorporate traceability into their development processes.
The following restrictions must be observed, regardless of whether easeRequirements® is used or not:
Links to MATLAB® artifacts:
If no surrogates are used, MATLAB® links are stored directly in the description of the respective Issue, and not in URL Field, which is used for Surrogates, or in generic Remote Links. This is caused by limitations of Jira itself, where URL Fields do not support multiple values, and Remote Links are not searchable.
Editing the issue description:
Jira® uses the complex Atlassian Document Format (ADF), which is only available as a JSON variant via the REST API. This makes automatic adaptation of the description technically challenging. Therefore, the use of surrogate issues is recommended for integration.
Required Jira® administration:
The setup of surrogate issue types, user-defined fields, and link types cannot be performed by regular users. This configuration must be done in advance by Jira® administrators so that the connector can be used effectively.
The following limitations apply to the use of GitHub® with the connector:
No support for surrogates:
Due to the specific workflow for issues in GitHub®, the connector does not support the creation of surrogate issues there.
Focus on bug fixing scenarios:
The intended use cases focus on supporting bug fixing processes reported via GitHub®, while ensuring direct traceability to the implementation artifacts in MATLAB®.
When using Trello® in conjunction with the connector, the following restrictions apply:
No support for surrogates:
No additional Trello® cards are created to represent MATLAB® artifacts, as this is not desired. Instead, links are added directly to the description of existing Trello® cards and updated accordingly when changes are made.
Display of card IDs:
Trello® uses long internal identifiers (IDs) for cards, which are normally invisible to end users (visible only in the URLs in the browser). In MATLAB®, however, these IDs are displayed as the target of the trace link in certain views. Since MATLAB® currently does not offer a way to customize the display of these links and additional queries to Trello® could affect performance, this display remains in place for technical reasons.
Displaying the link description:
Instead of using call-outs to interrogate linked objects directly on diagrams, MATLAB® provides access to additional information via the context menu of the corresponding block under “Requirements >”. The description of the link is displayed there, for example, the title of the linked object.
Teams benefit offline from the ability to import requirements locally as ReqSets. This allows them to work without an active connection to the ALM or PLM system while still viewing and maintaining all relevant information. These ReqSets can be easily shared with colleagues, which facilitates collaboration in distributed projects.
The Connector adds a Toolstrip “ReQonsult” to corresponding model views, as well as registers callbacks for the MATLAB® Requirements Toolbox, thus adding functionality of the Connector to the features, offered by MATLAB® out-of-the-box.
The Connector provides a comprehensive user interface for configuring connections and settings for each system. However, due to traceability requirements and for security and authorization reasons, each connection to the server is unique—users typically need a personal authentication token or user login credentials to gain access. Therefore, each user should configure the servers individually, while the settings for each system can be shared across the team. Copy the “preferences.json” file from the Connector’s installation folder on one computer to the Connector’s installation folder on another computer. Use the “Reset All Caches” option in the “Settings” dialog box if you change the file after the connector has already been initialized.
To uninstall the Connector from MATLAB®, simply uninstall the corresponding add-in. No uninstallation is necessary in the ALM/PLM systems, as no additional components were installed.
The following steps can be considered for data cleansing:
• Remove all links from the MATLAB® artifacts to the ALM/PLM objects.
• Remove all ReqSets with imported ALM/PLM artifacts.
• Delete all surrogate elements from your ALM or PLM system, or delete the links from the original artifacts to MATLAB® if you prefer the non-surrogate option. The easiest way to find all MATLAB® links is to search for the pattern “http://127.0.0.1:31415/matlab/”.
• Remove the configuration of the corresponding work item type and link type in your ALM or PLM system if they are no longer needed.
The Connector is continuously being developed to ensure the highest security standards. This includes regular updates to prevent known vulnerabilities and meet current legal requirements. In particular, compliance with the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is taken into account, so that customers can rest assured that the Connector can not only be operated securely today, but is also prepared for future regulatory requirements. This ensures that data protection and the integrity of integrations are always guaranteed.
Several important enhancements are planned for the Connector to further expand its performance and flexibility. Optional AI-supported functions are available, including an intelligent setup wizard supported by AI models such as ChatGPT® or Claude® to simplify configuration with ALM/PLM systems. An AI-based PDF import is also planned to make it easier to transfer content (one-way, without bidirectional traceability). In addition, seamless integration with CI/CD pipelines is planned so that traceability updates can be automatically integrated into development workflows. Finally, the possibility of allowing user-defined scripts and functions to customize the connector to individual needs is also being considered.
