Engineering Support in the Machine Manufacturing Domain through Interdisciplinary Product Lines: An Applicability Analysis

The increasing challenge to manufacture individual products in short periods of time necessitates a large amount of machine variants. Therefore, the efforts in engineering as well as in managing; the variability increase. An adequate support in modelling such variant-rich systems enhances reuse of variable parts of the machine and, by that, promises an improvement of efficiency during development. To provide a first step into this direction, this paper analyses the applicability of an interdisciplinary product line approach as one means to improve the engineering in the machine manufacturing domain. (C) 2015, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.