ProductionAware Modeling Approaches that Support Tracing Design Decisions In collaborative Production Systems Engineering (PSE), decisions of detail engineers depend on results of previous design decisions regarding Product, Process, and Resource (PPR), coming from other basic or detail engineering disciplines. However, the engineering results exchanged between disciplines often represent the production system view only. PPR design decisions are important to facilitate the productionaware exploration of the system design space, but are hard to express and trace in modeling approaches with only limited support for PPR. In this paper, we report on a survey of modeling approaches, which combine process and product modeling. We investigate the PPR modeling capabilities for productionaware systems design and for tracing design decisions in the engineering process. Major finding is that most of the investigated modeling approaches fulfill general requirements well, but address requirements regarding tracing PPR design decisions at most partially. As an exception, the Formal Process Description (FPD) provides good capabilities for PPR modeling and provides the foundations for tracing design decisions between basic to detail engineering.

Modelbased Systems Engineering Process for Supporting Variant Selection in the Early Product Development Phase Combining the benefits of modelbased systems engineering (MBSE) and product line engineering (PLE), modelbased product line engineering (MBPLE) is applied for the design and development of complex product line systems with variants. However, due to limitations such as visualization complexity and lack of support for variant selection, MBPLE is still not widely applied in the manufacturing industry. In this paper, we propose a modelbased systems engineering process in the early development phase to promote the application of MBPLE in the manufacturing industry. Through the integration of PSS planning model, SysML4Mechatronics modeling language and an optimal variant selection approach, the proposed process facilitates the modeling of a product line system and supports variant selection as well as architecture verification. The feasibility of the proposed systems engineering process is demonstrated with a case study.