How Automotive Engineering Is Taking Product Line Engineering to the Extreme Len Wozniak Paul Clements General Motors Company BigLever Software 3300 General Motors Road 10500 Laurel Hill Cove Milford, MI 48380 Austin, Texas 78730 USA +1 248 255 2332 +1 512 426 2227
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT 1. Introduction Automotive manufacturing ranks among the most extreme Automotive manufacturing likely represents the most challenging instances of systems and software product line engineering (PLE). environment for systems and software product line engineering The product family numbers in the millions, each product is (PLE) in the world today. The product family numbers in the highly complex in its own right, and the variation across products millions, each product is highly complex in its own right, and the is literally astronomical in scale. This paper explores the aspects variation across products is astronomical in scale. that make the domain extreme and the very specific implications they have for PLE. These implications include the need for These aspects of so-called mega-scale PLE have broad efficient manufacturing, complexity management, concurrent ramifications for the PLE approach and processes, both technical development streams, globally distributed engineering and and organizational, that are required to successfully manage this level of complexity. To borrow the tag line from a well-known production, a hierarchical product family tree, multi-level variation binding, constraint management, and a highly robust and General Motors marketing campaign, this is not your father’s PLE. integrated PLE tooling environment. Happily, the PLE paradigm supporting these implications brings about a number of Automotive PLE is, we believe, worth studying for a number of opportunities for analysis and automation that provide efficiencies reasons: of production previously unattainable.