An infrastructure for the life cycle management of multi product lines

Abstract

Large-scale industrial systems comprise multiple heterogeneous systems that need to be adapted and configured individually to meet the customers' needs. Product line techniques such as variability modeling and product derivation are frequently used to enable such customization. However, managing the life cycle of multiple product lines in system-of-systems architectures is challenging. For instance, support is lacking for defining the architecture of multi product lines. Further, system architects, modelers and configurers are missing a common infrastructure supporting domain and application engineering. This paper contributes a tool infrastructure providing essential structures and facilities for the development and operation of multi product lines. Based on an analysis of industrial scenarios we developed support for managing the life cycle of multi product lines. This comprises architecture definition and support for sharing and deploying product line models to the involved stakeholders. In this paper we show how the infrastructure supports system architects performing life cycle management of multi product lines. We demonstrate the feasibility of the approach based on a real-world industrial system.