A feature-based approach to product line production planning

A production plan, which describes how core assets are used to develop products, has an important role in product line engineering as a communications medium between core asset developers and product developers. Recently, there have been efforts to address issues related to production planning, most of which focus on the process and business/management aspects of production planning; not much emphasis is given to technical issues such as deciding which features will be made as core assets and what their granularity will be. In this paper, we introduce a feature-based approach to product line production planning and illustrate how our approach addresses these technical issues. In our approach, a feature model and feature-binding information are used as primary input to production plan development. A product line production plan created using our approach could be customized easily to a product-specific production plan, because when we developed the approach, we considered units of product configurations as well as their integration techniques.