Assessment of product line architecture descriptions in v.control

Today's automotive systems need to support a number of functional and technical variants. Within this context, product lines are used in automotive industry for the production and development of highly individualized products. The individualized products are typically based on a common platform and are built using so-called building blocks. To guarantee that only consistent products can be built, there has to be certain rules restricting the usage of the building blocks within the construction process. Feature models are a means to represent a products variability based on a very simple formalism. Additionally constraints relating different elements in a feature model can be used to formulate complex dependencies within a product line definition. Because of its simplicity, we suggest to us e feature models for the specification of variability within a structured development process, consisting of a step-wise refinement of functional requirements using architectural descriptions and software solutions. Surely, the specification of variability is an important step towards the handling of the corresponding complexity, but the main advantage comes with the analysis capabilities based on such variant system specifications. Within the publicly funded research project VEIA, a reference process and a prototypical tool "v.control" were developed. Using "v.control" a developer is able to specify, assess, configure and formally analyze variant development artifacts. With respect to the assessment of architecture descriptions, the user gets support within the decision process concerning general implementation issues, as there are generic or specific system implementations, already at a very early stage within a V-Model based development. Thus, the user is provided with a functionality to evaluate different solution alternatives concerning the handling of variability within the product development process.