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.

Demonstration of a Toolchain for Feature Extraction, Analysis and Visualization on an Industrial Case Study Transforming a cloneandown (i.e., new product variants are created by copying and modifying existing artifacts) code structure and development process to a Software Product Line Engineering (PLE) approach is a tedious and errorprone task. Holistic tool support for such a process is highly desirable, especially to lower efforts and to speed up the transformation. Unfortunately, such a holistic toolchain for reverse engineering of variability, supporting variantcentric and platformcentric extraction approaches is not available. In this paper, we present a toolchain covering the first steps for moving a cloneandown product development to a PLE approach. We validate the first prototype of the toolchain on a case study consisting of industrial firmware for smart motor controllers and we show that even this early prototype reduces time and effort for moving to a configurable platform approach in the sense of PLE.