A Product Line Systems Engineering Process for Variability Identification and Reduction

Abstract

Software Product Line Engineering has attracted attention in the last two decades due to its promising capabilities to reduce costs and time to market through reuse of requirements and components. In practice, developing system level product lines in a large-scale company is not an easy task as there may be thousands of variants and multiple disciplines involved. The manual reuse of legacy system models at domain engineering to build reusable system libraries and configurations of variants to derive target products can be infeasible. To tackle this challenge, a Product Line Systems Engineering process is proposed. Specifically, the process extends research in the System Orthogonal Variability Model to support hierarchical variability modeling with formal definitions; utilizes Systems Engineering concepts and legacy system models to build the hierarchy for the variability model and to identify essential relations between variants; and finally, analyzes the identified relations to reduce the number of variation points. The process, which is automated by computational algorithms, is demonstrated through an illustrative example on generalized Rolls-Royce aircraft engine control systems. To evaluate the effectiveness of the process in the reduction of variation points, it is further applied to case studies in different engineering domains at different levels of complexity. Subject to system model availability, reduction of 14% to 40% in the number of variation points are demonstrated in the case studies.

Software Product Line Engineering for Safety-critical Systems

“…The latter is realized similar to an UML component diagram. Thus, it is determined whether there are additional subcomponents of the individual system components of the FM, which must be considered as well (Li et al, 2018). The link is provided between the individual (abstract) features and the system components.…”

Software Product Line Engineering for Safety-critical Systems

“…Furthermore, there is no proposal for the creation of equivalence classes in order to cluster semantically similar features. (Li et al, 2018) propose an approach to reduce the complexity of FMs. In this paper, the complexity is reduced by linking the FM with the SM.…”

A value‐driven, integrated approach to Model‐Based Product Line Engineering

“…The reason for this is that virtually every organization performs some form of reuse (no system is created from scratch) and hardly manufactures one single instance of a product. Furthermore, several attempts to combine these two approaches into Model-Based Product Line Engineering (MBPLE) exist literature [Oster 2016][Chalé 2014][AFIS 2013][Young 2017][Li 2019]. Whilst most of these studies succeed in demonstrating that the combination of the two approaches can yield greater benefits than when applying them individually, practically none of them explores the problem in a holistic way nor tackles the challenges that arise when trying to implement MBPLE in real life, everyday practice in large organizations.…”