An approach for modeling variants of industrial automation systems

In order to meet requirements of different stakeholders, product lines for industrial automation systems have a high degree of variability. Despite the remarkable effort made by researchers and practitioners, modeling variants remains a challenge. It is often difficult to decide what does vary, how it varies and which interdependencies have to be considered between variants of an industrial automation system. This paper discusses the state of the art in modeling variants and proposes a new approach based on SysML for modeling variants of industrial automation system within a product line.