Supporting feature-oriented evolution in industrial automation product lines

Abstract

In the domain of industrial automation companies nowadays need to serve a mass market while at the same time customers demand highly customized solutions. To tackle this problem, companies frequently define software product lines (SPLs), which allow to automatically derive and further customize individual solutions based on a common platform. SPLs rely on defining common and variable platform features together with mappings, which define how the features are realized in implementation artifacts. In concurrent engineering such a feature-oriented process is challenged by the evolution of features, the complexity of feature-to-artifact mappings, and the diversity of the implementation artifacts. To address these challenges this paper introduces an approach supporting feature-oriented development and evolution in industrial SPLs. We outline the key elements and operations of our approach, including an implementation in a development environment. We report results of evaluating our approach regarding functional correctness, usefulness, and scalability based on a case study of a Pick-and-Place Unit (PPU) and an industrial case system.