Mechanical product lifecycle management meets product line engineering

Abstract

Early generation Software Product Line (SPL) engineering has evolved into Systems and Software Product Line Engineering (PLE) approaches that extend well beyond the original focus on source code, to a more holistic perspective of the engineering lifecycle. PLE tools and methods in commercial practice today support variation management in requirements, architecture, design models, source code, documentation, configuration data, test cases and more. One of the last lifecycle holdouts from PLE has been mechanical engineering, or Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). The engineering complexity of mechanical product families with embedded software has increased to a threshold where it is intractable for mechanical and software product line engineering to remain disjoint. This paper explores the convergence of mechanical, systems and software product line engineering and why it has been slow to emerge. The reasons are based both on conceptual misalignment among the traditionally distinct disciplines, as well the differences between the physics of mechanical and software systems. The Aras Innovator / BigLever Gears Bridge, an example PLM and PLE integration, is used to illustrate key concepts.