Adaptable platform‐based engineering: Key enablers and outlook for the future

Platform-Based Engineering (PBE) is a cost-effective, risk-mitigated system development approach that employs a common structure from which high-quality derivative products can be developed rapidly. PBE is especially effective in decreasing development cost, risks, and lead times while increasing product quality. Appropriately scoped, platforms simplify and accelerate the development of families of systems for a particular problem domain. They encompass domain-specific components and services that reflect the commonalities of systems in the domain (which can be configured as reusable physical or informational components), and variabilities across the domain (which need to be individually developed to achieve a domain product line), along with interface conventions that ensure that they can plug-and-play with the domain infrastructure and common components. However, PBE has a potential downside. Locking into a platform strategy for the long term can severely limit an organization's ability to evolve a product. It is this recognition that spurred the development of the adaptable PBE paradigm. Adaptable PBE offers the customary benefits of PBE without compromising the long-term evolvability of the system. This paper presents the game changing technologies under the adaptable PBE rubric, and discusses the key concepts and advances needed to make adaptable PBE an enabler of evolvable systems. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.