Using Product Sets to Define Complex Product Decisions

Product family engineering consists of several activities commonly separated into the areas of domain engineering and product engineering. The main part of product engineering is the definition of product decisions, which means in the context of feature modeling that for each feature the product engineer has to define in what products it will be included. In the automotive domain – and probably in many other embedded real-time domains as well – the considerations that influence these feature selections are extremely complex and, at the same time, need to be documented as closely as possible for later reference. In this paper, we (1) present a detailed description of this problem and (2) try to show that existing approaches do not sufficiently meet these concerns. We then (3) provide a detailed definition of product sets as a means to solve the problem and (4) show what methodological implications arise from the use of this concept.