In Rational Software Architect only the id of the element is used to resolve a reference which has led to the possibility that there will be more instances of broken references requiring manual intervention.
This possibility is due to support of previous product versions. When an element is created in a model it gets a unique id (adding an element across multiple product lines, which is sometimes the case required to introduce a new feature into the product) can subsequently introduce multiple unique IDs for the same added element. If a customer refers to this added element in their model and then later jumps product stream, the reference will then be broken from the customer's model to new Cúram model.
A broken reference can be reported during two phases: