Devising Integrated Process Models for Systems Product Line Engineering

Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary approach to translating users' needs into the realization of a system, its architecture and design through an iterative process that results in an effective operational system. While systems engineering has focused on defining a systematic life cycle process to meet the quality requirements, reuse has largely been an implicit concern. Systematic and comprehensive reuse has been addressed in the product line engineering (PLE) process. In practice, systems engineering process and product line engineering have developed and evolved separately. In this paper we aim to define the system product line engineering process that integrates the PLE reuse process with the current systems engineering process. For this we first model and discuss the so-called first and second generation PLE processes. Subsequently, we model and describe the systems engineering process life cycle and in particular the V-model. Based on these two inputs we present the first generation system PLE and second generation system PLE. We discuss the integrated processes and the lessons learned.