Valispace reloaded: Altium Requirements Portal with a generous license model

In 2020, I reported here for the first time about Valispace. The tool for requirements management. Valispace impressed me at the time because it systematically used the concept of parameterization for system decomposition and traceability. In the meantime, Valispace has been bought out and is now called Altium Requirements Portal.

This could be of particular interest to some: The current license model allows an unlimited number of regular users at a very affordable fixed price. I took a closer look at the offer.

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Well hidden: Unlimited number of authors

Many cloud tools advertise an unlimited number of users. However, the rights are often limited to reading and perhaps also writing comments. This is understandable, as the aim is to work together. But if users with reading rights also want to create content, they are often asked to pay.

The Altium Requirements Portal really is an unlimited number of full users for currently €960 per year. This is an „insider tip“, then the Pricing from Altium suggests otherwise. But the authors, for whom you have to pay extra, are only needed for the Altium Designer. Hidden in the FAQ is the fact that collaborators can also edit requirements.

This generosity is due to Altium's business model: compared to electronics design, requirements are a comparatively small customer segment. Not only that: Altium wants to get editors for the designer through better requirements management. This approach is legitimate, but naturally advantageous for companies that are primarily interested in requirements management.

History: from aerospace start-up to industrial group

MBSE is effective in mastering the complexity of product development, but it is also very complicated and full of errors. Mistakes are particularly expensive in space travel, after all, we can't just send a mechanic into space. The founding team of Valispace came from the aerospace industry. They founded the company in 2018 to solve this dilemma.

The idea behind it was simple but effective: components and subsystems are held together via parameterization. The parameters can be not only values, but also complex constraints or functions. This means that a large part of the explicit, manually maintained traceability can be replaced by implicit, mathematically linked traceability. Certain aspects of the system can also be verified automatically.

AI has been around for a long time

Artificial intelligence was already built into the tool when it was still called Valispace and before the AI hype really took off. The important thing with AI is how well it understands the project. If this foundation is in place, many use cases can be built on it. In the case of the requirements portal, these are

• Generate requirements
• Improve requirements
• Deocomposition of requirements
• Extract parameters (Valis) from requirements
• Find inconsistencies
• Evaluate quality

Some of the use cases are deeply integrated. For example, suggestions for improvement are automatically made when requirements are written. In other cases, users have the option of further specifying the instructions to the AI.

The basics: Parameterization with Altium Requirements

The Altium Requirements Portal comes with the usual features that we expect in requirements management today. However, handling parameters is something that only a few tools can do today. Furthermore, AI is already supporting the work in many areas. More on this in the next sections.

Typical tools have workspaces for requirements and V&V, as does the Requirements Portal. However, there is also a „Blocks“ area for the structure, which enables requirements to be mapped to blocks right from the start. We are familiar with this from MBSE, but few other tools come with it out of the box.

The tool groups requirements using folders and specifications. Administrators can create attributes and data types as you would expect. The versioning of requirements works virtually on the side. Exports and collaboration are also available. A dashboard is also included and can be seen in the profile picture.

Altium does not currently support baselines (any more), but these will be possible again next year (2026). The background to this is closer integration with Altium's other tools, whereby the important topic of global configuration will also be taken into account. API access is also currently missing, but this will also be reintroduced next year.

Parameters for implicit traceability

The use of parameters („Valis“) has long been a unique feature of Valispace to create implicit traceability. An example says more than 1000 words. Below I will show you how:

• A weight request is parameterized automatically
• The weights of the components are defined and added up
• The automatic verification provides real-time feedback on the fulfillment of the request.

To do this, we start with a simple requirement. The tool checks the quality with AI as soon as it is written, makes suggestions for improvement and, if desired, independently searches for valis in the requirement:

After the wizard has extracted the value from the request, the tool displays it in a different color. We can configure it further: The request has become a template filled with the Vali. We can then link the Vali to the rest of the system:

Requirements are associated with blocks, in this case with the MassAggregation block. This can now be broken down further. For this example, we assign a mass to each block.

We do not need to assign a mass to the MassAggregation block because we can calculate it from all the components attached to it. This shows that Valis are not just values with units, but can also be formulas, matrices and much more. The formula editor provides auto-complete and other support:

Automatic verification

In the final step, we want to use this information to Request to verify. To do this, we can attach a verification rule to the request so that the verification status becomes an attribute of the request. This attribute is updated in real time:

In addition to this automated verification, the Requirements Portal also has a module for V&V, which enables the definition of manual test cases.

Of course, there are many more possibilities for using Valis, adding up masses is very simple, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. In particular, we can not only link parameters, but also much more complex constructs.

Unique or one of many?

In the meantime, other tools, such as Flow Engineering or Dalus, introduced parameterization as a connecting element. Both seem to have been inspired by Valispace, which did pioneering work in this area.

Of course, there are also many even cheaper tools, starting with Word & Excel, but also somewhat more professional solutions such as easeRequirements, which the manufacturer has implemented as a plugin for Jira or Azure DevOps. Of course, these have no parameterization or system decomposition with blocks.

The acquisition by Altium sets the Requirements Portal apart from the rest in that it is planned to be closely integrated with the other disciplines. In addition to the module for requirements, there are:

• Altium Designer: ECAD for the development of circuits and electronic components
• Design Portal: Versioned library of designs for effective reuse
• BOM Portal: PLM with a focus on production and parts lists
• MCAD Codesigner: Integration with standard CAD systems for mechanics

Altium also sets itself apart with an aggressive pricing policy, which is also the motivation for this article. According to Marco Witzmann (founder of Valispace), Altium is planning a complete development environment with this program, which is for mechatronic systems what Microsoft Office is for the office world.

Altium Develop is a one-stop store for smart product development: it is becoming the standard solution for the development of mechatronic systems, just as MS Office has become the standard solution for office work.

Marco Witzmann, Head of Requirements Portal at Altium

Conclusion

It is exciting to see what Altium has done with the tool since the acquisition of Valispace and how a new product strategy that made the acquisition possible is unfolding. This is good news for users, as Altium is deliberately positioning itself as a cost-effective mainstream solution that covers a large part of the development of mechatronic systems. Small teams in particular will find a product here that hardly any other manufacturer has offered in this form to date.