Graphical Approach for Modeling of Safety and Variability in Product Lines

Reuse of already developed parts and concepts is a common approach in industry to reduce the time to market and reduce the development efforts. Industrial product lines are often grown over time and structured approaches to support decision-making and manage the complexity are lacking. When developing safety-critical products through product lines, evidence must be provided for all possible product configurations. The lack of a structured product line approach taking the functional safety dimension into consideration makes it challenging for practitioners to provide the required evidence. In this paper we (1) identify requirements that a variability management approach will need to fulfill, (2) discuss existing approaches and their limitations, (3) propose potential extension, (4) apply our approach in an industrial use case and (5) discuss its applicability and future work.