Feature models supporting trade-off decisions in early mechatronic systems design

Many development projects cause serious challenges to their developers: a rich set of new features has to be implemented within a restricted schedule and tight budget constraints. Often, this necessitates trade-offs: Certain features are incorporated into later releases to reduce risk of schedule delay. To support release planning, transparency regarding possible feature-trade-offs is needed: What exactly is the set of all planned features, what alternatives exist and how do they depend on each other? Especially in mechatronic systems design defining possible feature-trade-offs results in a big challenge. Due to its multidisciplinary character, dependencies from mechanics, electronics and software have to be considered. Within this contribution, we introduce feature-models as an appropriate approach to bring transparency into trade-off decisions. The model is integrated into a modelling technique for early mechatronic systems specification that supports the emerging app roach of Model-Based Systems Engineering. By this, we show how feature-models enrich the engineering of complex mechatronic systems.