Customizing a Feature Ontology for Product Line Engineering within a System-of-Systems Context

System of systems (SoS) is an arrangement of systems that results when independent systems are integrated into a larger system that delivers unique capabilities that cannot be provided by the constituent systems. Product line engineering (PLE) is a large scale comprehensive reuse approach to reduce the cost of development, reduce the time-to-market, and increase the quality of the system. In this paper, we report on our experiences in developing a PLE approach for a SoS context, that is SoS-PLE. The results are derived from an action research within the context of Aselsan, a large scale systems engineering company. One of the challenges for SoS-PLE is the selection and customization of the required ontology for commonality and variability modeling for the SoS context. Various different feature modeling approaches have been provided in the literature, but these have largely focused on single PLE. We show the analysis and selection of a feature ontology for SoS-PLE. Subsequently, the selected feature ontology is enhanced and integrated within the product line engineering process. The results of the paper provide novel insight for the state-of-the-practice in PLE for systems engineering, and elaborates on and complement the existing literature on feature ontologies and SoSs.