Integrated process model for systems product line engineering of physical protection systems

A physical protection system (PPS) integrates people, procedures, and equipment for the protection of assets or facilities against theft, sabotage, or other malevolent intruder attacks. Designing effective PPSs is not trivial and requires the consideration of multiple different concerns. Hence, several PPS methods have been proposed in the literature to design and analyze PPSs to realize the envisioned objectives. These methods have mainly considered the design of a single PPS. Yet, despite the differences, PPSs also share a common design and set of features and likewise can be developed using a systematic large scale reuse approach. Product line engineering (PLE) has been used in various application domains to exploit the potential for large scale reuse, and with this reduce the time-to-market, reduce the cost, and the overall quality of the developed systems. In this paper, we first report on the results of our study to explicitly model the process for developing PPSs. Subsequently, we present the integration of the PPS method with the current PLE method. For modeling the processes, we adopt the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). The resulting method can be applied to the development of various PPSs while considering large-scale reuse.