The Role of Requirements and Specification in Product Line Engineering

Product line engineering dealing with software and system families for automotive systems needs a deeper structuring and understanding of systems, their functions, and operational modes than the engineering of individual systems, since the variability of the systems introduces an additional dimension and further complexity. In fact, the enormous complexity of systems today requires a much more structured approach to engineering anyhow. It will be demonstrated how to derive a better structuring of systems by three complementary views at the conceptual level including 1) the context view in terms of context models, 2) the functional view by function hierarchies and operational modes 3) component architecture models. These views bridge the gap between functional requirements and their technical realization. We show how such an approach leads to a more structured understanding of systems in terms of different views on their properties and their mutual logical relation and how this can be used as a basis for product line engineering. We introduce concepts, in particular, of logic to define logical dependencies between different levels of abstractions and perspectives of systems.