In the domain of industrial automation companies nowadays need to serve a mass market while at the same time customers demand highly customized solutions. To tackle this problem, companies frequently define software product lines (SPLs), which allow to automatically derive and further customize individual solutions based on a common platform. SPLs rely on defining common and variable platform features together with mappings, which define how the features are realized in implementation artifacts. In concurrent engineering such a feature-oriented process is challenged by the evolution of features, the complexity of feature-to-artifact mappings, and the diversity of the implementation artifacts. To address these challenges this paper introduces an approach supporting feature-oriented development and evolution in industrial SPLs. We outline the key elements and operations of our approach, including an implementation in a development environment. We report results of evaluating our approach regarding functional correctness, usefulness, and scalability based on a case study of a Pick-and-Place Unit (PPU) and an industrial case system.

中文翻译：

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支持工业自动化产品线面向特征的演进

在工业自动化领域，如今公司需要服务于大众市场，同时客户需要高度定制的解决方案。为了解决这个问题，公司经常定义软件产品线 (SPL)，它允许基于公共平台自动派生和进一步定制单独的解决方案。SPL 依赖于定义通用和可变平台功能以及映射，映射定义了功能在实现工件中的实现方式。在并发工程中，这种面向特征的过程受到特征演变、特征到工件映射的复杂性以及实现工件的多样性的挑战。为了应对这些挑战，本文介绍了一种支持工业 SPL 中面向特征的开发和演进的方法。我们概述了我们方法的关键要素和操作，包括在开发环境中的实现。我们报告了基于拾放单元 (PPU) 和工业案例系统的案例研究，评估我们的方法在功能正确性、实用性和可扩展性方面的结果。