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How automotive engineering is taking product line engineering to the extreme

Published: 20 July 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Automotive manufacturing ranks among the most extreme instances of systems and software product line engineering (PLE). The product family numbers in the millions, each product is highly complex in its own right, and the variation across products is literally astronomical in scale. This paper explores the aspects that make the domain extreme and the very specific implications they have for PLE. These implications include the need for efficient manufacturing, complexity management, concurrent development streams, globally distributed engineering and production, a hierarchical product family tree, multi-level variation binding, constraint management, and a highly robust and integrated PLE tooling environment. Happily, the PLE paradigm supporting these implications brings about a number of opportunities for analysis and automation that provide efficiencies of production previously unattainable. We focus on one example in depth: The management and automated generation of the many thousands of calibration parameters that determine vehicle-specific software behavior. Throughout, we use the vehicle product line at General Motors, which we believe to be the world's largest, to illustrate and ground our journey through automotive PLE.

References

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Dillon, M., Rivera, J., Darbin, R., Clinger, B., "Maximizing U.S. Army Return on Investment Utilizing Software Product-Line Approach," Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC), 2012.
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Flores, R., Krueger, C., Clements, P. "Mega-Scale Product Line Engineering at General Motors," SPLC 2012, Salvador, Brazil, 2012.
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SPLC '15: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Software Product Line
July 2015
460 pages
ISBN:9781450336130
DOI:10.1145/2791060
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

  • Vanderbilt University: Vanderbilt University
  • Biglever: BigLever Software, Inc.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 20 July 2015

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Author Tags

  1. automotive product lines
  2. bill-of-features
  3. feature modeling
  4. feature profiles
  5. product configurator
  6. product line engineering
  7. product portfolio
  8. second generation product line engineering
  9. software product lines
  10. variation points

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SPLC '15
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  • Vanderbilt University
  • Biglever

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SPLC '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 34 of 87 submissions, 39%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 167 of 463 submissions, 36%

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