Model-Based Product Line Engineering in an Industrial Automotive Context: An Exploratory Case Study

Product Line Engineering is an approach to reuse assets of complex systems by taking advantage of commonalities between product families. Reuse within complex systems usually means reuse of artifacts from different engineering domains such as mechanical, electronics and software engineering. Model-based systems engineering is becoming a standard for systems engineering and collaboration within different domains. This paper presents an exploratory case study on initial efforts of adopting Product Line Engineering practices within the model-based systems engineering process at Volvo Construction Equipment (Volvo CE), Sweden. We have used SysML to create overloaded models of the engine systems at Volvo CE. The variability within the engine systems was captured by using the Orthogonal Variability Modeling language. The case study has shown us that overloaded SysML models tend to become complex even on small scale systems, which in turn makes scalability of the approach a major challenge. For successful reuse and to, possibly, tackle scalability, it is necessary to have a database of reusable assets from which product variants can be derived.