Michael Schlick

Applying feature models in industrial settings

A software product line is a collection of products sharing a common set of features that address the specific needs of a given business. The PRAISE (product-line realization and assessment in industrial settings) project, partly funded by the European Commission under Esprit contract 28651 and pursued by Thomson-CSF/LCR (France), Robert Bosch GmbH (Germany), and the European Software Institute (Spain), is currently investigating product-line realization and its assessment in industrial settings. A part of the project is dedicated to the validation and consolidation of proposed product-line technologies in full-scale industrial experiments. This paper presents the first experimental results obtained by Bosch. The Bosch experiment is located in the car periphery supervision (CPS) domain. One focus has been on feasibility of variability modeling with feature-oriented domain analysis (FODA. The experiment has shown that the FODA model does not provide the necessary expressiveness to represent the different types of crosslinks that are necessary to describe the domain. This paper presents an extension to overcome this shortcoming.

A Case Study in Applying a Product Line Approach for Car Periphery Supervision Systems

Car Periphery Supervision (CPS) systems comprise a family of automotive systems that are based on sensors installed around the vehicle to monitor its environment. The measurement and evaluation of sensor data enables the realization of several kinds of higher level applications such as parking assistance or blind spot detection. Although a lot of similarity can be identified among CPS applications, these systems are traditionally built separately. Usually, each single system is built with its own electronic control unit, and it is likely that the application software is bound to the controller’s hardware. Current systems engineering therefore often leads to a large number of inflexible, dedicated systems in the automobile that together consume a large amount of power, weight, and installation space and produce high manufacturing and maintenance costs. This paper reports on an initiative undertaken by the Bosch Group in applying a product line development approach to develop CPS systems economically. Product line development represents a multi-system engineering approach which takes common and variable aspects between systems in the same application domain into account. It provides a basis to develop a line of products economically based on a common system architecture and reusable components. A product line allows the degree of reusability to be optimized across different systems while simultaneously preserving the overall quality. This supports the need to develop more integrated and flexible multi-functional systems quickly and cost-effectively. The purpose of this paper is to report on the experiences and results obtained from a case study in developing a product line of CPS systems.

Modeling for configuration employing hybrid knowledge representation

Domain modeling for technical configuration problems addresses the need for dedicated knowledge representation facilities. In this article we present the hybrid system C3L which combines a declarative with a procedural knowledge representation paradigm. This is especially useful for the elaboration of a model for the configuration of modular vehicle bus systems. Some key features of such a model will be explained in the following.