Goetz Botterweck

Companies successfully applying product line approaches often follow a long-term strategy and need to plan product portfolios years ahead. For instance in the automotive industry, managers constantly make decisions about future product evolution, like “the LED tail lights will be introduced with the next facelift and the LED front lights two years later”. With a raising number of features, feature changes, and evolution steps, a systematic approach for evolution planning becomes essential. However, there is only very little support for such evolution in model-based product line engineering so far. This paper presents an approach for extending model-driven product line engineering towards automated and tool-supported techniques for product line evolution. We provide a feature-based approach to model the variability over time and a catalogue of change operators for feature models.