Issues and challenges with industrial-strength product composition

One way to deal with product lines and products that have to exist in many variants is to use a component-based approach. This allows a lot of flexibility in creating new products and can reduce time and costs. However, the flexibility in composing products from a base of components is not without problems. Complexity increases in the composition process when combining many components to one large system - in particular because components may also exist in several revisions or variants. Furthermore, there are many different stakeholders involved in the development of new components and products and they all work at different levels of granularity and have different needs. From the analysis of a complex industrial context, we have identified a set of issues and challenges that need to be addressed for advanced product composition. A shared component base can work as a repository for storing facts and information about components and a rule-base will allow users to reason about configurations at a higher level such as completeness and consistency.