This paper deals with the management of business rules and requirements to be integrated to a PLM system during the SE process. It proposes a rule and requirement management process made of four stages: the expression of the rule, the activation of the rule, the application of the rule and the checking of the requirement. To support this process, a generic meta-model is presented. The proposed model is called DALTON for “DAta Linked Through Occurrences Network” because it is based on a data network. The model is validated with a use case taken from the nuclear industry, and algorithms in Java were developped to implement the associated reasoning automating the process of rules and requirements engineering.