Product Line Configuration Meets Process Mining

Abstract

Product line engineering is a new production paradigm that provides organizations a competitive edge by improving productivity and decreasing costs. The purpose with this new production paradigm is no longer to develop a single product but to develop a product family and to generate the products of the line through configuration processes. However, the potential benefits of product line engineering can be missed when dealing with large product lines because the configuration processes become error prone tasks. Consequently, guiding stakeholders during such complex configuration processes and recommending the best configuration alternatives until leading to a satisfying experience becomes a challenge. This paper focuses on enhancing product line configuration processes through process mining techniques. Therefore, user’s actions of previous product line configurations are logged, mined and analyzed. We conducted a preliminary research to motivate the advantages of process mining in product line configuration and to explore what can process mining bring for configuration processes and how to use it to enhance configuration processes. Thus, guidance questions are sketched in order to position process mining as a solving tool for the configuration difficulties. Furthermore, we propose a reference architecture that considers process mining for configuring product lines.