Architectural modelling in product family context

The software development community pursues the development of software systems with a higher degree of reuse, reduction of costs, and shorter time to market. One of the successful mechanisms followed to achieve these goals is based on sharing the development efforts, producing sets of similar products. This approach is known as Product Family Engineering (PFE). Architectural modeling (producing architectural models) in product families is a key issue in PFE activities and it will be the main focus of this paper. First, we will propose an architectural UML meta-model for PFE, able to represent the different variations in products. This meta-model will set up the conceptual basis for two valuable sets of activities that reflect industrial best practices: one deals with effectively building and maintaining the product family architecture and the other with the automatic derivation of architectures of specific products. A small example of automatic derivation is included.